Vitalik Buterin’s Latest Net Worth 2024: Ethereum Co-Founder

Vitalik Buterin is a Russian-Canadian programmer with a net worth of $600 million. Born in Russia, he’s best known as the co-founder of Ethereum and Bitcoin Magazine. Buterin first got involved with Bitcoin thanks to his father who was a computer scientist.

Quick Facts

He started off writing articles for Bitcoin Weekly in 2011 for five 5 BTC each – at his time bitcoin was $3.50 per coin! When Bitcoin Weekly closed down he co-founded Bitcoin Magazine and became their lead writer. While working here, Buterin applied for a job at Ripple but was unable to obtain a U.S. visa.

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Buterin launched Ethereum in 2014 with 7 others, Vitalik is the only co-founder left working on the project. The other co-founders left to start new projects – Charles Hoskinson runs Cardano and Gavin Wood started Polkadot. ETH is described as a “decentralised mining network and software development platform” that helps with the creation of new cryptocurrencies that share a blockchain.

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Buterin’s idea for Ethereum came from believing that Bitcoin was missing a scripting language for app development. Since launching Ethereum has gone on to become the second largest cryptocurrency and it’s rapid rise in price has made many millionaires! As ETH is a centralized project, the co-founders were granted a premine of Ether.

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Vitalik holds 333,521 ETH in his public main address – currently worth $786 million! At his peak, Buterin owned 405,000 ETH but sold some when the price increased. As cryptocurrencies are volatile assets to hold, his net worth is tightly aligned to the price of ETH.

In May 2021, when Ethereum hit $4,000 his net worth on paper reached $1.3 billion! Since then the crypto market sold off heavily and is currently worth $1 billion. Some respected voices in the crypto industry are expecting Ethereum to peak at $10,000 towards the end of 2021. A large bulk of his wealth is still left in Ethereum and is unlikely to sell more until the price reaches all time highs.

Because Vitalik’s wallet address is widely known, the creators of some cryptocurrencies sometimes give him large donations to promote their project. The creators of SHIB gifted Vitalik 505 billion coins – half of the coins in existence.  His SHIB holdings peaked at $14 billion, he donated $1 billion to an India COVID relief fund and burned the rest of SHIB.

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