Vitalik Buterin, a Russian-Canadian entrepreneur and programmer from Toronto, first envisioned Ethereum when he was 19-years-old.

In 2011, the year Buterin first grew interested in Bitcoin, Buterin co-founded the online news website Bitcoin Magazine, writing hundreds of articles on the cryptocurrency world. He went on to code for the privacy-minded Dark Wallet and the marketplace Egora.

Along this journey, he came up with the idea of Ethereum, a platform inspired by Bitcoin, but that could go beyond the financial use cases.

He released a white paper in 2013 describing an alternative platform that would allow developers to create their own decentralized applications using a built-in programming language. Many developers were drawn to this idea because these new applications would be accessible to a global audience, highly secure, and much faster to build because there are no intermediary services to integrate.

To accomplish this, Ethereum makes it easy to create smart contracts, code that automatically creates an outcome when certain conditions are met. For his work, Buterin was also named a 2014 Thiel fellow, winning a $100,000 grant to work on Ethereum.

After Buterin unveiled the Ethereum white paper, several other developers joined the ranks including CEO of IOG Charles Hoskinson, Decentral CEO Anthony Di Iorio and Akasha Founder Mihai Alisie. Buterin also introduced two new members to the team:

Since Ethereum data and transaction information is public, users can track how much money Buterin has stored in ether, Ethereum's native token.

Buterin's main address is this one, which shows that he owns 333,348 ether, worth approximately $405million at the time this article was published.

To get the project off the ground, Buterin and the other founders launched a crowdfunding campaign in July 2014 where participants purchased ether, the Ethereum tokens that function as shares in the project.

Raising more than $18m, it was the most successful crowdsale at that time. It took another year, but the first live release, Frontier, launched on 30th July, 2015. It wasn’t a particularly attractive platform, but the command line interface offered developers a platform for creating their own decentralized apps.

The smart contract platform took off, swelling into today’s ecosystem of hundreds of developers and even drawing the attention of tech giants like IBM and Microsoft.

The funds from Ethereum’s initial $18m crowd sale and project development are now managed by the Ethereum Foundation, a non-profit entity based in Zug, Switzerland.

By Alyssa Hertig