Who Founded Ethereum?
While working on various Bitcoin projects, a 19-year-old programmer from Toronto, Vitalik Buterin, came up with the idea of Ethereum. Ethereum was originally intended to be a powerful platform that would allow programmers to build applications on the Blockchain chain. Buterin was inspired by the weaknesses in building Bitcoin blockchain applications. He believed that the potential of blockchain technology was not only in the financial sector, so he quickly proposed using blockchain in computing tasks. Vitalik Buterin first encountered Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in 2011. That was the year he co-founded Bitcoin Magazine, where he wrote numerous articles about the potential and future of the currency. He then worked on Mastercoin and other coins based on the Bitcoin codebase. This work convinced him that the potential of the Bitcoin blockchain was limited. The Ethereum white paper was released in 2013. It documented a new open-source protocol that allows for the creation of decentralized applications. Ethereum was officially announced on the Bitcointalk forum in 2014. In addition to Buterin, the co-founders were Mihai Alisie, Anthony Di lorio and Charles Hoskinson.
Buterin also revealed that he was working with developers Dr. Gavin Wood and Joseph Lubin. Wood quickly introduced the Ethereum yellow paper, which included the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) creating a runtime environment that would destroy all smart contracts on the network. Lubin, for his part, founded ConsenSys, an investment firm focused on developing decentralized applications.