Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin becomes the world’s youngest crypto billionaire

Source: Twitter

The price of Ether surged past $3,000 on May 4 making its creator, Vitalik Buterin, the world’s youngest crypto billionaire at the age of 27.

Cryptocurrency ether extended gains to another record peak, after breaking above $3,000 for the first time a day earlier as investors bet on its growing utility. Early in Asia trade it traded as high as $3,457.64 on the bitstamp exchange, for a session rise of about 17 percent.

Traders have attributed the gains – which amount to some 365 percent for the year to date – to a catch up on bitcoin’s late 2020 leap and as upgrades to the ethereum blockchain make it more useful.

According to an address disclosed by Vitalik Buterin in October 2018, the 27-year-old Ethereum founder now holds over $1 billion worth of ETH in his main wallet.

Ethereum’s price surge has made Buterin the youngest cryptocurrency billionaire and the second youngest self-made billionaire behind only Austin Russell. Austin Russell who founded Luminar Technologies in 2012 became a billionaire at age 25. According to Forbes, Russell currently has a net worth of $2.6 billion.

Born in 1994, Vitalik Buterin is a Russian-Canadian programmer and author who founded Ethereum in 2014. Prior to launching Ethereum, in 2012, Buterin co-founded and wrote for Bitcoin Magazine with Mihai Alisie, who later joined Buterin in founding Ethereum.

He also was awarded the prestigious Thiel Fellowship in 2014, offering $100,000 for young people under the age of 23 to pursue interests outside of academia.

Not just this, Buterin has been generous and has also donated about $600,000 in ether and maker (MKR) tokens to a COVID-19 relief fund for India.

Ether is the second-largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalisation of $376 billion after bitcoin by market value. It is also more valuable than corporations like Nestle, the Walt Disney Company and even the Bank of America in terms of total market capitalisation.

According to CoinMarketCap, with the exponential growth of the decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible token (NFT), and the stablecoin ecosystem, ethereum prices have increased by more than 320 percent since the beginning of 2021.