Ethereum went live on June 30, 2015, arguably having become the largest news in crypto since the advent of Bitcoin. But when its idea was born and who are its founding fathers?
The birth of the idea
When was the idea of Ethereum born?
Some say it happened in 2009, with the appearance of Bitcoin as the first ever practical solution of decentralization. There is no doubt that seeing Blockchain succeed in the form of a payment protocol has had a great influence on Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum.
However, a more particular date would be 2012. That year, Buterin left the University of Waterloo to travel the world and take part in different cryptocurrency projects for six months. It was during this trip that the Russian-born Canadian Vitalik Buterin conceived the idea of Ethereum, a
cryptoeconomically-secured platform for development of any kinds of decentralized applications.
Vitalik’s main fields of academic interest are information theory, cryptography, sociology, politics and economics. Ethereum was born at the intersection of those disciplines as an instrument for building more secure, trustworthy and wasteless systems than ever before.
Buterin’s Whitepaper
Soon after, Vitalik began drafting the Ethereum Whitepaper. The document provided a justification for the development of a new technology, outlined its fundamental principles and possible applications. It was the crucial step in the development of a new protocol to sort out the idea’s primordial soup.
The Whitepaper was published in late 2013, and about a month later, on January 23, 2014, Vitalik
announced the start of Ethereum project on the Bitcointalk forum.
In his post, Buterin revealed that he was cooperating with
Dr. Gavin Wood and
Jeffrey Wilcke as principal core developers. Wood, a self-styled free-trust technologist, took the major part in Ethereum’s development after Buterin himself. He published his
“Yellow Paper”, the formal specification of Ethereum Virtual Machine, in April 2014. He then helped code its first functional implementation into seven programming languages. This marked the creation of the first prototype of Ethereum platform.