Buterin is a seemingly all-around nice guy, a billionaire, a genius, and the so-called “philosopher-king of the blockchain world.”
Buterin is a cofounder of Ethereum and a cofounder of Bitcoin Magazine. He is a Russian-Canadian crypto savant who was only a teenager when Etherum was started. Of the eight cofounders of Ethereum, he is the only one still directly working on the project.
He maintains a personal blog which contains musings about more than crypto.
He willingly participates in on-stage spectacles and musical numbers during Ethereum conferences.
He is a philanthropist. He has donated large amounts in the form of meme-coin Shiba Inu to fight COVID in India. He also has a passion for anti-aging research.
Very active, insightful, and funny on Twitter. He once requested that people to send him some of the most “unhinged” things they
have seen written about him on the internet. The ones he posted himself include a comments stating that he looks like an “alien crackhead,” a Bond villain, and someone who missed their calling to shoot up a school. By shining a light on ugly-side of internet anonymity, Buterin flipped the script and took control of this
narrative.
Despite his penchant for wearing t-shirts depicting rainbows and unicorns, he has no problem telling people off. At the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a Russian journalist tweeted to Vitalik, “If you are now ashamed that you are Russian, don’t worry, you are not Russian.” Vitalik had a simple response. (It loosely translates to “Go F**k yourself.)
Buterin’s internet support of Ukraine likely had a major impact on the over 60 million dollars sent in cryptocurrency to support Ukraine resistance in just the first few weeks after the invasion.
Buterin is also the face of Time Magazine’s first full-length magazine NFT. Though the headline indicates that he harbors negative feelings toward the industry, the articles goes on to provide an in-
depth assessment of how Buterin is forecasting future trends and adjusting Ethereum’s goals as a result – always with the intention of making the world a better place.
This cover garnered a lot of attention. Once again, Buterin flipped the narrative on the haters of the Twitter-verse, several of whom compared his appearance to Tom Brady.
Tom Brady himself replied to Buterin’s tweet.
Then of course, Buterin caught a lot of Twitter-flak for not knowing who Tom Cruise is.
