The birth of Ethereum, triggered by one boy's quiet desperation

Vitalik Buterin is a Russian-Canadian programmer. He showed extraordinary talent in mathematics and programming from an early age. He was passionate about the online game "World of Warcraft".

But one day, the character he had been working hard to develop was drastically nerfed. This incident caused him to despair at the state of affairs where central administrators were unilaterally controlling things, and he quit playing the game.

In 2011, when he was 17 years old, Buterin was introduced to Bitcoin (BTC) by his father. The young Buterin began to research BTC himself and discovered the appeal of the web without a central administrator. When he wrote an article about Bitcoin on the Internet, the article caught the eye of Mihai Alizi (current founder of Akasha), and he launched "Bitcoin Magazine".

The following year, Buterin entered the University of Waterloo, but soon decided to drop out. He began to put together a plan to use blockchain for purposes other than issuing cryptocurrencies. In 2013, Buterin sent a white paper to his friends. The idea spread by word of mouth and gained supporters. He succeeded in raising approximately 1.5 billion yen.

Thus, full-scale development began, and Ethereum, the world's first smart contract platform, was born in July 2015.