Description
Buterin was born in Kolomna, Russia, to a Russian family. His father, Dmitry, was a computer scientist. He and his parents lived in the area until the age of six, when his parents immigrated to Canada in search of better employment opportunities. While in grade three of elementary school in Canada, Buterin was placed into a class for gifted children and was drawn to mathematics, programming, and economics. Buterin then attended The Abelard School, a private high school in Toronto. Buterin learned about Bitcoin from his father at the age of 17.
After high school, Buterin attended the University of Waterloo. There, he took advanced courses and was a research assistant for cryptographer Ian Goldberg, who co-created Off-the-Record Messaging and was the former board of directors’ chairman of the Tor Project. In 2012, Buterin won a bronze medal in the International Olympiad in Informatics in Italy.
In 2013, he visited developers in other countries who shared his enthusiasm for code. He returned to Toronto later that year and published a white paper proposing Ethereum. He dropped out of university in 2014 when he was awarded with a grant of US$100,000 (equivalent to $128,704 in 2023) from the Thiel Fellowship, a scholarship created by venture capitalist Peter Thiel and went to work on Ethereum full-time.
On 30 November 2018, Buterin received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Basel.
