The co-creator of cryptocurrency Ethereum is now the world’s youngest crypto-billionaire and the second youngest self-made billionaire ever.
Vitalik Buterin, 27, helped start up the Ethereum blockchain back in 2015, and saw the value pass $3,000 (£2,163) on Monday morning, marking a 325 percent increase since the beginning of 2021.
Buterin has an Ether address that he made public in 2018, which contains 333,520ETH, which at the current value adds up to $1.09 billion (£790 million) given the current price of $3,278 (£2,363).
Not bad, given that he’s still not even 30 years of age.
Ether cryptocurrency currently has a market cap of $376 billion (£271 billion) making it the second largest cryptocurrency in the world behind Bitcoin.
It’s been on the up-and-up all year largely due to the increase in interest in cryptocurrency as well as the popularity of decentralised finance apps (DeFi) that are threatening to replace traditional financial institutions such as banks and insurance companies.
Forbes reports that Buterin was born in a town just outside of Moscow in 1994, but later moved to Canada and was raised in Toronto.
He co-founded and wrote for Bitcoin Magazine and was awarded a prestigious fellowship – the Thiel Fellowship – that gave him $100,000 to pursue potential outside of more standard education such as university.
The grant was funded by Peter Thiel, who is himself a billionaire and was an early investor in Facebook.
Just a year later, Buterin and his developing team launched Frontier, which they called the ‘barebone implementation of the Ethereum project.’
Ethereum was launched in 2014.
Now, as the value has soared so drastically, Buterin has become the world’s youngest crypto-billionaire and the second youngest self-made billionaire behind Austin Russell, who started up Luminar Technologies in 2012 and found himself a billionaire at the age of only 25 last December.
According to Forbes, Russell’s net worth currently stands at $2.3 billion (£1.87 billion).
Despite cracking their highest ceiling ever in recent days, Ethereum – and Bitcoin – could yet surge even higher, according to senior editor for OKEx Insights, Hunain Naseer.
