The co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine and a cryptocurrency evangelist, Vitalik Buterin, created Ethereum at the age of 19. But he did not come out with the idea of Ethereum out of the blue.

 

Since childhood, he has been a math and computer science geek who soon realized that the traditional education system is flawed and does not teach how to think, learn and reason.

After being introduced to Bitcoin by his dad in 2011, he spent his days researching and writing about it, which led him to contemplate over the flaws of the cryptocurrency. He dropped out of college to accept a Thiel Fellowship and travelled the world with his bitcoins.

 

Vitalik was interested in releasing an update to Bitcoin to introduce a scripting language. However, being refused by the community, he decided to build his own platform. He then released a whitepaper in 2013 which outlined how the Ethereum technology would help people to make decentralized applications on top of it.

 

When Ethereum was introduced to the public in 2014, it’s core developers included Vitalik, Mihai Alisie, Anthony Di Iorio, and Charles Hoskinson. Further developments of Ethereum were undertaken by the Swiss-based Ethereum Switzerland GmbH and later by the non-profit organization, the Ethereum Foundation.

 

The project was financed by the 2014 crowdsale of ether which raised around $18 million.

 

Dr.Gavin Wood and Joseph Lubin had also joined hands with Vitalik as a part of the project. Wood soon released the Ethereum yellow paper, which covered the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the runtime environment that executes all of the smart contracts on the network and became the “technical bible” for Ethereum developers. On the other hand, Lubin founded ConsenSys, a venture studio focusing on building decentralized applications.

 

To test their hypothesis the team had launched Olympic, the 0th version, as a proof-of-concept and placed a 25,000 ether bug bounty. There have been several upgrades since then which include Frontier and Homestead.

 

The Ethereum community further grew in 2017 with the formation of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), which was a group of start-ups, Fortune 500 companies, and research groups. In little over a year, the Alliance grew from 30 founding members to 150 members including big names like ConsenSys, Microsoft, The CME Group, J.P.Morgan, Samsung, Deloitte, Toyota Research Institute etc.

 

More versions like Metropolis and Serenity are expected to be released whereas the platform itself is expected to shift its consensus algorithm to proof of stake(Casper).