Who Founded Ethereum and Who Controls it Now?

The entire crypto world has seen massive growth since the establishment of Bitcoin in 2008. Sure, Bitcoin has revolutionized the way we see online payments, but little did we know at the time that much more is to come in the decentralized world.

Just three years after Bitcoin was established, the Ethereum network was invented. So, what does it represent and who is the mastermind behind its creation? Let’s take a closer look.

Ethereum – The Basics

Before we dive into details about the person behind the Ethereum creation, we are due a word or two about the network itself. It is an open-source blockchain network that introduced decentralized applications – a new generation of apps that don’t rely on central authorities or servers.

Smart contracts are at the core of the Ethereum network. They represent agreements that are code-bound and they execute automatically under predetermined conditions. Smart contracts replace the traditional roles that centralized parties held in overseeing and controlling transactions.

Ether is the native currency of the Ethereum network. Thanks to the Ethereum-based innovations such as decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens, this is a very ambitious concept that requires the input of many different people.

Vitalik Buterin – The Mastermind

We still don’t have a real identity for the person who created Bitcoin, but that is not the case with Ethereum. The Russian-Canadian programmer and writer Vitalik Buterin is the person behind the Ethereum project.

He has been involved in the Bitcoin community since 2011, writing various articles on the topic. Buterin travelled around the world for six months in 2013 and shared his idea of developing a new and possibly better version of the Bitcoin blockchain.

So, Ethereum now supports various functions, such as the aforementioned decentralized apps. Thanks to smart contracts – programs that can be saved on the Ethereum platform, all this is possible.

Ethereum’s Birth

Buterin released a white paper in 2013 in which he described his idea of the Ethereum network. He sent that white paper to his friends, who then shared it with their friends, and in a short period, around 30 people reached out to Buterin.

The idea of Ethereum was pretty much about a digital currency at the start, but the vision changed over time.

By the start of 2014, Buterin and his team realized that it was fairly straightforward to develop a decentralized file storage. There, different concepts like name registry can be brought alive with just a bit of code.

So, in late January 2014, the Ethereum project was publicly announced. Besides Buterin, the core team consisted of:

• Charles Hoskinson – American entrepreneur who left the project in 2014 due to disagreements with Buterin over the non-profit structure of Ethereum.
• Anthony Di Iorio – helped with branding and marketing.
• Mihai Alisie – played a key role in setting up the Swiss company that gave Ethereum the financial foundation at the start.
• Joseph Lubin – co-founder of the Ethereum Foundation and ConsenSys – a startup that seeds the Ethereum ecosystem with apps and infrastructure.
• Gavin Wood – created the first Ethereum testnet and designed the Yellow Paper of Ethereum, which explains the specifications of Ethereum.
• Jeffrey Wilcke – transcribed the Ethereum platform into Google’s Go Programming Language.

Buterin later used a Bitcoin conference in Miami to present Ethereum, and just a few months later, the team decided to do an initial ICO of ETH.

With that, the team raised around 31,000 BTC for the sale of ETH, which was worth about $18 million back in the time – quite a successful crowdfunding campaign!

Who Controls Ethereum Now?

As an open-source blockchain platform, Ethereum is built by thousands of developers from all around the world. Due to its decentralized nature, there is no single entity or authority controlling or owning it.

Sure, the people mentioned above are credited with creating the network’s infrastructure at the start, but the big degree of control over it falls to the users of the Ethereum community.

Any crypto user on the Ethereum network who runs a network code or holds Ether can validate transactions on the network. So, the success of the entire project relies on the functional participation of the diverse Ethereum community.

Worries About Its Long-Term Future and Use

Even though it seems like a network that will flourish over time, Vitalik Buterin recently voiced his concerns about the long-term future of Ethereum.

He acknowledges that Etherem has soared in both volume and value, but he can’t help the mixed feelings at the moment.

Buterin is angry about the fact that Ethereum has made a handful of men exceedingly rich and that some people and organizations use Ethereum for tax evasion, money laundering or other types of fraud. He also notes that if implemented wrong, cryptocurrencies have a dystopian potential, so we all have to be very careful.