The founder of Ethereum, started programming at the age of 4, dropped out of school at the age of 19, and his net worth exceeded 1 billion US dollars at the age of 27!

Yesterday, two more people were added to the global billionaires list. One is Melinda, who divorced Bill Gates, and the other is Vitalik Buterin, the 27-year-old founder of Ethereum (known as V God in the industry). On the morning of May 4, Ethereum (ETH), which has risen by more than 300% this year, hit a new record high.

According to the Coindesk platform, as of 7:30 a.m., Ethereum hit a new high of $3,454 before falling back.

Although Ethereum is currently trading at $3,329, which has fallen significantly from its early morning high, the 333,520 ETH held by Ethereum's founder, Russian-Canadian Vitalik Buterin, is still worth more than $1 billion, with a net worth of more than 7 billion yuan.

The world's youngest cryptocurrency billionaire

While Bitcoin remains the world's largest cryptocurrency, other cryptocurrencies are gaining momentum. Ethereum, the world's second-largest and most widely used cryptocurrency, surpassed $3,000 for the first time on May 3.

According to the latest market data, the price of Ethereum (ETH) exceeds 21,000 yuan, and the total market value is approximately RMB 2.5 trillion.

According to statistics from the AssetDash platform, Ethereum's current market value exceeds that of listed companies including PayPal, Bank of America, Home Depot, etc.

The market chart shows that the price of Ethereum has continued to rise over the past year. A year ago, its price was just over $200 (about RMB 1,300). So far, the price of Ethereum has risen 16 times, and its total market value has become the second largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin.

As the price of Ethereum continues to rise, Vitalik Buterin, who owns more than 330,000 Ethereum, has successfully squeezed into the global $1 billion club.

At only 27 years old, he is also the youngest cryptocurrency billionaire in the world. (Who is Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of the largest cryptocurrency Bitcoin, is still a mystery)

"Genius child" starts programming at age 4

Used to be addicted to games

Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, programmer, and writer, is known as V God in the industry. Born in 1994, V God is only 27 years old this year. He is thin and looks like Jack Ma, but this does not affect his status in the cryptocurrency circle at all.

When you were 4 years old and could only play in the mud, Vitalik Buterin had already started his programming journey.

According to previous media reports, Vitalik was born into an IT family in Russia on January 31, 1994. Both of his parents were engaged in computer research at a university in Moscow.

When he was 4 years old, his father gave him his first computer, which became his favorite toy. Unlike other children who like simple computer games, Vitalik Buterin is fascinated by writing programs that can calculate by themselves using Excel.

When he was 5 years old, his parents divorced and Vitalik immigrated to Toronto, Canada from Moscow with his father.

Vitalik is not only talented in mathematics and programming, but also in languages. For example, it only took him a few months to become able to speak Chinese fluently.

At the age of 7, he created a complex document called "Rabbit Encyclopedia", a small world populated by rabbits, but the rules of the world conform to very strict formulas, full of mathematics, charts and calculations. In the third grade of elementary school, Vitalik was assigned to the top class for gifted children.

At the age of 12, Vitalik began writing simple games for himself in C++, including a small program that simulated the movement of a pinball in a room, a modified version of "Space Invaders", and a medieval fantasy-themed chess game.

The game Vitalik made when he was about 12 years old

However, in 2007, like many of his peers, he was addicted to the online game "World of Warcraft" produced by Blizzard and would play it all day long.

His character is a warlock who is proficient in demonic spells. He played all the way from Classic to Wrath of the Lich King with his demon followers. However, in 2010, Blizzard removed the warlock's skill "Life Siphon" in patch 3.10, which made Vitalik very unhappy. He protested on the official Blizzard forum, but received no official response.

This made Vitalik realize the drawbacks of "centralized management" of online games - the owner of the game is Blizzard, and they can modify the game content at will without asking the players' opinions. So he decided to give up the game, even though he had spent 3 years on his Warlock.

Dropped out of school at 19

Became a billionaire at 24

When Vitalik Buterin was 17 years old, his father Dmitry Buterin was already the co-founder of a blockchain incubator, Blockgeeks Labs. Under the influence of his father, Vitalik Buterin began to know Bitcoin and showed a strong interest in this new thing.

In order to better understand this decentralized and fully distributed currency, Vitalik began to read Bitcoin forums and technical materials. He also wrote articles for Bitcoin Weekly to earn Bitcoins, with a fee of five Bitcoins per article. At the time, five Bitcoins were worth only $3.5.

Later, this part-time job stopped because the website was shut down, and Vitalik decided to create his own media, called Bitcoin Magazine. He wrote and published many influential articles himself. He also won the bronze medal of the Olympia Information Award, which established his status in the Bitcoin world.

Bitcoin Magazine's inaugural issue

That year, he was only 18 years old. Later, the magazine was acquired by BTC Media.

In 2013, at the age of 19, Vitalik, who had just entered the University of Waterloo in Canada, was madly obsessed with blockchain technology. He was thirsty for knowledge and published the first edition of the Ethereum White Paper and began to recruit developers. While others were in college, he had the ambition to use blockchain to subvert the real economic system.

So he chose the same path as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg: drop out of school.

In 2013, the price of Bitcoin quickly climbed from $10 in the previous year to $49. The Bitcoin that Vitalik had previously earned suddenly became his first pot of gold.

With this money, Vitalik began to travel around the world. He visited Bitcoin developer communities in the United States, Spain, Italy, Israel, and other countries, and joined the Bitcoin transformation work (Bitcoin 2.0).

In the process of building Bitcoin 2.0, Vitalik had a new idea. He believed that Satoshi Nakamoto used a complex scripting language to write the Bitcoin protocol, which led to Bitcoin incubating more applications. He hoped to develop a universal platform on which all developers could build their own blockchain extension applications.

At the end of 2013, the 19-year-old Vitalik Buterin developed a decentralized computing platform based on blockchain technology, named Ethereum, and conducted crowdfunding through ICO. Users could pre-order Ethereum with Bitcoin. The price of Ethereum was 2,000 Ethereum = 1 Bitcoin. At the price of $600 per Bitcoin at the time, one Ethereum was $0.3.

In July 2014, the Ethereum crowdsale was officially launched, and the result was a sensation, with more than 7 million Ethereum coins sold in 12 hours. The 42-day crowdsale allowed the Ethereum team to raise 31,000 Bitcoins (US$18.4 million), making it the second most valuable ICO in the history of cryptocurrency.

As of April 14, 2018, the price of Ethereum was as high as 3,000 RMB. Vitalik has about 500,000 Ethereum in his account, which puts him on the list of the world's billionaires.