A few minutes later, electronic music will start playing, stuffed animals will be flung through the air, women will emerge spinning hula hoops, and a mechanical bull will roar into action. The closing party of the conference is dedicated to the ethereum. The lines stretched for days. On this Sunday night in February, the energy is peaking.
A man with elfin features is sprinting out of the venue as the crowd pushes inside. Some call out, imploring him to stay, others chase him down the street, on foot and on scooters. The man outruns them all, disappearing into the privacy of his hotel lobby alone.
Vitalik Buterin didn't come to Denver to party. He doesn't drink or like crowds. There is plenty for the 28-year-old creator to celebrate. Nine years ago, Buterin dreamed up a way to leverage the technology underlying Bitcoin for all sorts of uses outside of currency. It has become the bedrock layer of what advocates say will be a new, open-source, distributed internet. The platform's native currency, ether, has become the second biggest criptocurrency behind Bitcoin, and it powers a trillion dollar platform that rivals Visa in terms of money moved. Thousands of unbanked people around the world have been brought into financial systems, allowed capital to flow across borders, and provided the infrastructure for entrepreneurs to build all sorts of new products, thanks to the infrastructure provided by ethereum.
Buterin has watched the world he created evolve with a mixture of pride and dread. It has made a few white men rich, pumped pollutants into the air, and emerged as a vehicle for tax evasion.
There are dangers to overeager investors, the soaring transaction fees, and the displays of wealth that have come to dominate public perception.
Politicians show their increasing interest in cryptocurrencies.
Buterin hopes that ether will be the launching point for all sorts of socio political experimentation, such as fair voting systems, urban planning, universal basic income, and public-works projects. He wants the platform to upend Silicon Valley's hold on our digital lives. He acknowledges that his vision is at risk of being overtaken by greed. He reluctantly began to take on a bigger public role in shaping its future.
Despite all of Buterin's cachet, he may not have the ability to prevent ether from deviating off course. He designed it to be a platform that was responsive to the will of its builders, investors, and ever-expanding community. Buterin is not the leader of the company. He doesn't agree with the idea that anyone should have power over the future.
Buterin is reliant on the limited tools of soft power, which include writing, giving interviews, conducting research, and speaking at conferences where many attendees just want to bask in the glow of their newfound wealth. Whether or not Buterin's approach works, and how much sway he has over his own brainchild, may be the difference between a future in which a new era of digital life is created, and one in which it is just another instrument of financial speculation.
Buterin's attention goes back to the region where he was born three days after the music stops. In the war launched by Putin, the use of cryptocurrencies became a tool of Ukrainian resistance. The Ukrainian government and NGOs received more than 100 million dollars in the first three weeks of the invasion. Some fleeing Ukrainians have found a new home with the help of cryptocurrencies. Regulators are concerned that it will be used by Russians to evade sanctions.
The situation in the last three weeks has reminded a lot of people, buterin has sprung into action too, matching hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants toward relief efforts.
He has been slow to find his political voice, but his outspoken advocacy marks a change.
The war is personal to Buterin, who has both Russian and Ukrainian ancestry. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he was born to two computer scientists, Natalia Ameline and Dmitry Buterin. His mother's parents lost their life savings due to rising inflation.
The family lived in a dorm room with a shared bathroom. His parents washed him by hand because there was no disposable diaper available. Vitalik's mind was teeming. Vitalik was slow to form sentences compared to his peers because he was learning how to read before he could sleep.
Vitalik preferred the clarity of numbers. He started playing with spreadsheets when he was 4 years old. He was able to recite more than a hundred digits of pi at 7. He was coding at 12. The move to Toronto in 2000 made the child isolated from his peers. Vitalik's Canadian upbringing was described by his father as lucky and naive.
Vitalik was introduced to the world in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. After seeing the collapse of financial systems in both Russia and the U.S., Dmitry was interested in the idea of an alternative global money source. Vitalik was able to earn 5 bitcoins by writing articles about the new technology for the magazine, which is worth $200,000 today.
Vitalik Buterin was able to articulate complex ideas about cryptocurrencies and its underlying technology in clear prose as a teenager. A lot of people think of him as a typical techie engineer, says Nathan Schneider, a media-studies professor at the University.
Buterin began to believe that using the technology solely for currency was a waste when he learned more about it. He thought that the ledger could be used to secure all sorts of assets. Each of these could be operated by smart contracts that could be programmed to carry out transactions. A version of the rideshare industry could be built that would allow passengers to send money directly to drivers.
In the newsletter Into the Metaverse, you can read the rest of Buterin's interview. You can get a weekly guide to the future of the internet. Past issues of the newsletter can be found here.
Buterin dropped out of college in order to write a white paper about his vision for a new open-sourced block chain. Buterin took the name from a list of elements from science fiction. He passed it on to friends in the community. A number of programmers and businessmen around the world sought out Buterin in hopes of helping him bring it to life. Within months, a group of eight men were sharing an apartment in Switzerland with investors.
Buterin kept to himself, coding away on his laptop, while some of the other founders mixed work and play. The group had different plans for the technology. Anyone could build anything on the platform. Others wanted to use the technology to start a business. One idea was to use customer data in order to sell targeted ads in the same way that Google does. The men were fighting over power and titles. Buterin joked that his title would be C-3PO, after the droid from Star Wars, because one co-founder appointed himself CEO.
Buterin was left with a culture shock. He had gone from a cloistered life of writing code and technical articles to that of a decisionmaker grappling with bloated egos and power struggles. The biggest divide was that a lot of these people cared about making money. According to public records, Buterin's net worth is at least $800 million. That made them upset.
The other founders tried to push through their own ideas, but Buterin was afraid of regulators. He asked the two co-founders to leave the group because they were pushing the project to become a business. The creation of the Ethereum Foundation was set in motion by him.
Over the next few years, all of the other founders peeled off to pursue their own projects, either in tandem with or as direct competitors. They are still critical of Buterin's approach.
Buterin emerged as the leader of the philosophy. He had clout to shape industry trends and move markets with his public statements. In China, he became known as V God. He didn't step into the power vacuum. Danny Ryan is a lead researcher at the EF. Buterin said that he had a curse for the first few years of being an organizational leader.
It's not hard to see why. When you meet Buterin, he doesn't present stereotypical leadership qualities. He struggles to hold eye contact, sniffles and stutters through his sentences, and walks stiffly. He doesn't put much effort into his clothing, mostly because he's wearing shirts from his friends. His disheveled appearance has made him an easy target on social media, as he recently shared insults from online hecklers who said he looked like a Bond villain or an alien crackhead.
Almost all of the people who have a full conversation with Buterin come away impressed. Buterin is almost completely devoid of pretension or ego. He is an unabashed nerd whose eyes light up when he sees one of his favorite concepts. Buterin is an everything thinker with a wide range of disciplines, like land-tax history and advanced math. He's using the app to learn his other languages. He doesn't talk to people and he doesn't have a security detail.
Being around Buterin gives him a similar vibe to when I first met Sir Tim Berners-Lee, according to the co-founder of Reddit.
For years, Buterin has wrestled with how much power he has. The first major test came in 2016 when a newly created Ethereum-based fundraising body called the DAO was hacked for $60 million, which amounted to 4% of all ether in circulation. The hack tested the values of the community, if they believed no central authority should be able to change the code governing smart contracts, then thousands of investors would have to eat the loss. If Buterin used a hard fork to reverse the hack, he would have the same kind of central authority as he wanted to replace.
Buterin was in a middle position. He consulted with other leaders, wrote posts about the hard fork, and watched as the community voted in favor of it. Users and miners had the option to use the hacked version of the platform. They chose the forked version, and the price of ether recovered quickly.
The promise of a distributed approach to governance was epitomized by the DAO hack. It's very easy for new leaders to rise up.
Over the past few years, a lot of leaders have risen up in Ethereum, building all kinds of products. Billions of dollars were raised in the initial coin offerings of the year. Money flowed around the world in the summer of 2020 because of new trading mechanisms. Last year's explosion of NFTs, like profile pictures, art collections, and sports cards, skyrocketed in value.
Billion-dollar economies have been built upon the perceived digital ownership of simple images that can easily be copied and pasted, and skeptics have derided the utility of NFTs. They have become one of the most utilized components of the platform. OpenSea hit a record $5 billion in monthly sales in January.
Buterin didn't predict the rise of NFTs, and has watched the phenomenon with interest and anxiety. They helped to increase the price of ether, which has increased more than tenfold in value over the past two years. I own less than $1,300 worth of ether. Their volume has overwhelmed the network, leading to a steep rise in congestion fees, which can be used to make sure transactions are expedited.
NFT Art Collectors are playing a risky game.
Some of Buterin's favorite projects have been undermined by the fees. Proof of Humanity gives a universal basic income of about $40 per month to anyone who signs up. The network's congestion fees can make it hard to pay for basic needs.
There is a stark lack of gender and racial diversity in other ways.
There has been a backlash inside and outside the community. The financial excesses, jargon, and culture ofcryptocurrencies have been met with disdain. The prospect of lower transaction fees, alternative building tools, or different philosophy are driving frustrated users to switch to newer blockchains like Solana and BNB Chain.
Buterin understands why people are moving. He says he's fine with it, even though it has too many users. He lost a lot of money, but he still gave $6 billion worth of Shiba Inu token to charity.
A representative confirmed that he and the EF are taking several approaches to improve the environment. Last year, they gave out $27 million to projects based on the Ethereum platform, up from $ 7.7 million in 2019.
Two important technical updates are being worked on by the research team. The first is known as the “merge,” which converts ether from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake, which will reduce its energy usage by more than 99%. Buterin has been stumping for Proof of Stake since the beginning, but the delays have turned it into a Waiting for Godot style drama. Danny Ryan said that the merger would happen within the next six months. Even if the merger is delayed, Buterin encouraged companies to use ether until it's done.
In January, Moxie Marlinspike, co-founder of the messaging app Signal, wrote a widely read critique, noting that web3 was already coalescing around centralized platforms. He responded to the criticism with a detailed post on the website.
The race to implement sharding in the face of competition is aticking time bomb according to Buterin.
As the technical issues get worked out, Buterin has turned his attention to larger sociopolitical issues that he thinks the blockchain might solve. You can find a lot of information on housing, voting systems, city building, and longevity research on his website. While living in Singapore, Buterin spent a lot of his time writing dispatches from the road.
Glen Weyl says that Buterin has gone on a journey from being more sympathetic to anarcho-capitalist thinking to Georgist-type thinking. A recent post by Buterin calls for the creation of a new type of NFT based on participation and identity. The allocation of votes in an organization might be determined by the commitment an individual has shown to the group, as opposed to the number of token they own.
How investors are handling falling prices.
While Buterin's main tool of public persuasion is his website, his posts are more about intellectual explorations that invite debate. Harberger taxes is one of the ideas that Buterin often criticizes. A leader can work through complex ideas with transparency and rigor, exposing the messy process of intellectual growth for all to see, and perhaps learn from it.
Some of Buterin's more radical ideas can cause alarm. In January, he caused a minor uproar on social media by suggesting that synthetic wombs could reduce the pay gap between men and women. He predicts that someone who is born today will live to be 3000, and that he will take the anti-diabetes medication Metformin in the hope of slowing his aging body.
Time gives a weekly guide to the future of the Internet in its newsletter Into the Metaverse. Past issues of the newsletter can be found here.
In March, President Biden signed an Executive Order seeking a federal plan for regulating digital assets. He held a private conversation with the Colorado Governor, who supports cryptocurrencies. Buterin is worried about the political valence of the U.S., where Republicans have generally been more eager to embrace it.
The worst-case scenario for the future of digital currency is that it ends up in the hands of dictators. He is not happy with El Salvadoran's use of the digital currency as legal tender. One of the reasons Buterin is adamant about keeping the coin is the possibility of governments using the technology to crack down on dissent. He believes that the technology is the most powerful of its kind deployed by governments and powerful companies alike.
Buterin doesn't believe that Mark Zuckerberg should have the power to make decisions or control users' data, even if that limits his ability to shape the future of his creation. Tech work and research and development coming out of the other end is good crazy. This is the battle. We have to make sure more of the right things happen.
The reporting was done by Nik Popli and Mariah Espada.
We can be reached at letters@time.com.
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