Back when the world only knew $BTC , and blockchain was seen as nothing more than a system for recording transactions, a 19-year-old prodigy began to emerge. His name was Vitalik Buterin, a young programmer from Canada with Russian roots
Vitalik Butarin
By 2013, Bitcoin had emerged as a technology of freedom, capturing the attention of developers around the world. Vitalik was no exception. He joined the Bitcoin community early on and quickly realized that Bitcoin’s blockchain had far greater potential than serving as just a digital currency system.
In Vitalik’s view, to truly unlock the power of blockchain technology, the ecosystem needed something more flexible, a platform capable of supporting many different types of applications, not just payments. To address this limitation, he proposed a new kind of platform, one that could execute smart contracts and support decentralized applications.
That idea became $ETH
2 - Idea to Reality
The concept was first introduced in a whitepaper published in late 2013. Soon after, the project began to take shape as the development team expanded, with co-founders joining in, including Gavin Wood, Joseph Lubin, Anthony Di Iorio, and Charles Hoskinson.