#ETH The year Jercos sold 10,000 bitcoins for $400, in Toronto, Canada, Vitalik Buterin, a 17-year-old boy, heard about Bitcoin for the first time from his father.

His father, Dmitry Buterin, was the co-founder of an early blockchain incubator at the time. He thought Bitcoin was interesting and wanted Vitalik to take a look.

At that time, Vitalik was still a high school student. Like most high school students, he also loved to play games. Because he loved programming, he would usually write some small games in C++ language to play by himself. In addition, he loved to play World of Warcraft.

In World of Warcraft, he has many game characters, including a level 80 mage, a level 80 warlock, a level 73 paladin, and many other game characters.

"Ethereal" looks very similar to "Eethereum", so much so that some people later believed that Ethereum was inspired by Warcraft, but Vitalik denied this statement. This may be a coincidence, or people may subconsciously feel that there is a connection.

After hearing about Bitcoin from his father, Vitalik's life changed. He became fascinated with Bitcoin and studied it every day. In order to better understand the Bitcoin network, he not only read white papers and other technical materials, but also wrote Bitcoin-related articles on his blog.

For a while, he wrote articles about Bitcoin while traveling around, and he went to Amsterdam, San Francisco, Israel and other cities. At that time, he earned about 5 Bitcoins for writing an article (at that time, 5 Bitcoins were only worth 3.5 US dollars). When he earned 20 Bitcoins, he spent 8.5 to buy a shirt, which was probably the most expensive shirt in the world.

Soon, Vitalik became famous in the cryptocurrency circle at that time. At the end of 2011, he received an invitation from a Romanian to co-found Bitcoin Magazine as a co-founder and serve as the chief writer.

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He was paying attention to Bitcoin while attending school. The more he learned about it, the more interesting he found the Bitcoin network. Vitalik even thought that in addition to coins, it would be interesting to run some small games or other programs on the Bitcoin network. In this way, the prototype of smart contracts was born.

Vitalik quickly put this idea into action. In November 2013, he wrote the first version of the Ethereum white paper and sent it to his friends. That year, he was admitted to the University of Waterloo, one of the top three universities in Canada. Like Bill Gates, Zuckerberg and other shining figures, Vitalik also felt that going to school was too time-consuming, so he dropped out after 8 months to focus on blockchain.

On January 23, 2014, he published the Ethereum white paper, Ethereum: A Next-Generation Cryptocurrency and Decentralized Application Platform, in his Bitcoin Magazine.

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With this plan, Vitalik crossed the Pacific Ocean to China to raise funds. At that time, he was just 21 years old, thin and small, with blond hair. Sitting on the side of the road playing with his mobile phone, he looked like an uneducated teenager addicted to games. What was even worse was that someone gave him the title of a scientist, so when he was raising funds in China, the entire cryptocurrency circle was despised again because of his title. Some people said that the cryptocurrency circle was really full of scammers and anyone could be a scientist.

However, Fenbushi Capital had just been established that year and Shen Bo, who was preparing to make a big splash in the blockchain field, chose to believe him and invested US$500,000 in him. According to reports at the time, Fenbushi Capital received 416,000 ETH, which is approximately 1 US dollar per ETH. the cost of.

Later, Ethereum became the forerunner of Blockchain 2.0, and Vitalik became V God. In 2017, Ethereum's token ETH exceeded US$1,000 for the first time, and Fenbushi Capital received a return of nearly 1,000 times. This investment made Shen Bo a god in the blockchain VC circle.

Today, Ethereum is still the best basic public chain. Thousands of decentralized applications such as small games, DeFi protocols, and NFTs originally planned by Vitalik are based on Ethereum. As of May 21, ETH was temporarily reported at $2,863, with a circulating market value of $331.7 billion. At the same time, OKLink data showed that the locked funds of DeFi protocols on Ethereum were $82 billion. #ETH