![]() ![]() There were no disposable diapers available, so his parents washed his by hand. The family initially lived in a university dorm room with a shared bathroom. “So I wanted Vitalik to question conventions and beliefs, and he grew up very independent as a thinker.” “Growing up in the USSR, I didn’t realize most of the stuff I’d been told in school that was good, like communism, was all propaganda,” explains Dmitry. Monetary and social systems had collapsed his mother’s parents lost their life savings amid rising inflation. He was born outside Moscow in 1994 to two computer scientists, Dmitry Buterin and Natalia Ameline, a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union. The war is personal to Buterin, who has both Russian and Ukrainian ancestry. “I would rather Ethereum offend some people than turn into something that stands for nothing.” “One of the decisions I made in 2022 is to try to be more risk-taking and less neutral,” Buterin says. His outspoken advocacy marks a change for a leader who has been slow to find his political voice. “One silver lining of the situation in the last three weeks is that it has reminded a lot of people in the crypto space that ultimately the goal of crypto is not to play games with million-dollar pictures of monkeys, it’s to do things that accomplish meaningful effects in the real world,” Buterin wrote in an email to TIME on March 14. At the same time, regulators worry that it will be used by Russian oligarchs to evade sanctions.īuterin has sprung into action too, matching hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants toward relief efforts and publicly lambasting Putin’s decision to invade. Cryptocurrency has also provided a lifeline for some fleeing Ukrainians whose banks are inaccessible. More than $100 million in crypto was raised in the invasion’s first three weeks for the Ukrainian government and NGOs. In the war launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin, cryptocurrency almost immediately became a tool of Ukrainian resistance. Three days after the music stops at ETHDenver, Buterin’s attention turns across the world, back to the region where he was born. And he fundamentally rejects the idea that anyone should hold unilateral power over its future. Buterin is not the formal leader of Ethereum. That’s because he designed it as a decentralized platform, responsive not only to his own vision but also to the will of its builders, investors, and ever sprawling community. The irony is that despite all of Buterin’s cachet, he may not have the ability to prevent Ethereum from veering off course. ![]() “And those are often far from what’s actually the best for the world.” “If we don’t exercise our voice, the only things that get built are the things that are immediately profitable,” he says, reedy voice rising and falling as he fidgets his hands and sticks his toes between the cushions of a lumpy gray couch. And so he has reluctantly begun to take on a bigger public role in shaping its future. But he acknowledges that his vision for the transformative power of Ethereum is at risk of being overtaken by greed. Above all, he wants the platform to be a counterweight to authoritarian governments and to upend Silicon Valley’s stranglehold over our digital lives. Buterin hopes Ethereum will become the launchpad for all sorts of sociopolitical experimentation: fairer voting systems, urban planning, universal basic income, public-works projects. ![]()
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