The rally in various cryptocurrency tokens shows no signs of slowing down, with several of these currencies having gone to lifetime highs in terms of price in 2021. This has continued the surge which began last year, and while these assets are volatile, often dropping in price by huge percentages in a single day, overall, the price has been shooting upwards over the last 15 months or so. This has made fortunes for early investors as well as those who put their money in before the current rally. Ethereum is one such token that has done extremely well – the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has more than quadrupled its price since January 2021, and made one of its co-founders, Vitalik Buterin, a billionaire in the process.
Buterin, who is just 27 years old, holds around 333,500 ETH tokens according to his public wallet, which is worth over $1.3 billion at the time of writing, as Ethereum crossed $4000. This makes him one of the youngest billionaires in the crypto industry, and indeed in the world. Buterin was born in Kolomna, a Russian town near Moscow, with his family moving to Canada when he was young, where he attended the University of Waterloo. He now lives in Singapore.
He was introduced to Bitcoin by his father in 2011, and was just 19 years old when he came up with the idea for Ethereum in a white paper. The token was then crowdfunded in 2014 and went live in 2016 with a supply of 72 million Ether coins. It is quite remarkable that the token has gone from such humble and small beginnings to be changing the world today, not just in the crypto sector but globally. Ethereum has the potential to transform various sectors and industries through smart contracts and decentralized apps. One such example is of the online gambling sector, where the use of crypto has already made a huge impact. Various online casino operators now use blockchain networks to improve their games and websites, while players can also use crypto tokens to place bets. Thus, an Ethereum live casino in Canada is no longer a pipe dream anymore, with several of these casinos now in operation, and all of them seeing huge traffic and an increase in revenue as a result.
Ethereum is also being used to transform the way apps work on our phones, as well as banking and finance. It is no exaggeration to say that while the price of the token is a fraction of where Bitcoin is at the moment, Ethereum has much higher potential, since it can be applied across a wide range of industries and sectors. This is why many in the crypto industry believe that Ethereum could eventually become the most valuable cryptocurrency in the world, overtaking Bitcoin, although this is still at least a couple of years away.
The Ethereum network is also poised for a series of upgrades which would increase its appeal even more. It is set to move to a proof of stake model, as opposed to proof of work, which will make it far more energy efficient over the likes of Bitcoin, while it is also set to implement sharding, which will also make it easier to mine Ethereum for regular users. These upgrades, which are collectively known as Ethereum 2.0, will increase its appeal even more, and thus we can potentially expect Ethereum to climb even further as this upgrade is announced and implemented in the near future.
Bitcoin may be the biggest and most famous cryptocurrency, but Ethereum has posted huge gains in the last year or so, and with the upcoming upgrades, it can soar even further, so you can expect further stories of Ethereum billionaires to be in the news very soon.
