Vitalik Buterin, a Russian-Canadian entrepreneur and programmer from Toronto, envisioned second-largest cryptocurrency 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 for the Ethereum ecosystem, a platform inspired by Bitcoin that could go beyond the financial use cases.