Buterin laid the foundations of Ethereum in 2013 when he was just 19, writing a white paper that outlined “a next-generation smart contract and decentralized application platform.”
Buterin’s work took the groundbreaking development of Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain technology to the next level. He foresaw that blockchain technology could build different platforms with even greater possibilities, driven by smart contracts.
For those new to crypto, a smart contract is a self-executing program whose terms and rules are encoded on a blockchain. Think of the Uber App on your phone, minus both Uber the company and your phone. Smart contracts aim to ditch intermediaries of all kinds, enabling seamless, automatic, trackable and irreversible agreements between any parties.
The Russian-born developer proposed using blockchain-based smart contracts to encode all the assets and bylaws of entire organizations, allowing them to function without independent oversight.
The Ethereum blockchain became a reality when it launched two years after Buterin wrote his white paper, in July 2015.
