Bitcoin Magazine In 2011, Buterin began writing for a publication called
Bitcoin Weekly after meeting a person on a bitcoin forum with the aim of earning bitcoin. The owner offered five
bitcoin (about $3.50 at the time) to anyone who would write an article for him. Buterin wrote for the site until it shut down soon thereafter due to insufficient revenue. In September 2011, Mihai Alisie reached out to Buterin about starting a new print publication called
Bitcoin Magazine, a position which Buterin would accept as the first co-founder and contribute to as a leading writer.
Bitcoin Magazine in 2012 later began publishing a print edition and has been referred to as the first serious publication dedicated to
cryptocurrencies. While working for
Bitcoin Magazine, Buterin reached out to
Jed McCaleb for a job at
Ripple who accepted. However, their proposed employment fell apart after Ripple was unable to support a U.S. visa for Buterin. In addition, he was from 2016 to 2024 a member of the editorial board of
Ledger, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that publishes full-length original research articles on the subjects of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.
Ethereum Buterin is the inventor of
Ethereum, described as a "decentralised mining network and software development platform rolled into one" that facilitates the creation of new cryptocurrencies and programs that share a single
blockchain (a cryptographic transaction ledger). Buterin first described Ethereum in a white paper in November 2013. Buterin had argued that bitcoin needed a scripting language for application development. But when he failed to gain agreement, he proposed development of a new platform with a more general scripting language. The Ethereum white paper was circulated, and interest grew in the new protocol in late 2013 and early 2014. Buterin announced Ethereum more publicly at the North American Bitcoin Conference in
Miami on 26 January. Buterin delivered a 25-minute speech, describing the general-purpose global computer operating on a decentralized permissionless network, ending with potential uses for Ethereum that ranged from crop insurance to
decentralized exchanges to
DAOs. About the Ethereum Project, Buterin said in 2020: "I am truly grateful to have the opportunity to work in such an interesting and interdisciplinary area of industry, where I have the chance to interact with cryptographers, mathematicians and economists prominent in their fields, to help build software and tools that already affect tens of thousands of people around the world, and to work on advanced problems in computer science, economics and philosophy every week." However, in a 2018
New Yorker article, his father suggested that Buterin was trying to avoid the focus on him as the
philosopher king of the blockchain world, stating "He is trying to focus his time on research. He's not too excited that the community assigns so much importance to him. He wants the community to be more resilient."
Open-source software Buterin has contributed as a developer to other open-source software projects. by
Cody Wilson, Bitcoin
Python libraries, and the cryptocurrency marketplace site Egora.
Work with Glen Weyl Buterin came into contact with economist
Glen Weyl after tweeting about Weyl's proposal for a new
wealth tax. The two then wrote a manifesto
Liberation Through Radical Decentralization, where they highlighted the common ground between Buterin's work on cryptocurrencies and Weyl's work on market-based solutions to social problems. Collaborating with Zoe Hitzig, a PhD student at
Harvard, they published a paper in 2019 entitled
A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods. The paper sets out a method for optimal provision of public goods, using a version of
quadratic voting. As of August 2022, quadratic funding had been used to allocate over $20 million to open-source software projects, primarily through Gitcoin Grants.
Artificial intelligence In May 2021, Buterin donated $665 million to the
Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit which, amongst other things, seeks to mitigate the
existential risk from artificial intelligence. Buterin worries that AI could become the new dominant species on Earth, and may "end humanity for good". == Awards and recognition ==