Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin on the Bitcoin Bubble and Running a $125bn Blockchain
The coder on the highs and lows of being at the helm of one of the most successful cryptocurrencies
By Chloe Cornish
Up in San Francisco’s Monterey Heights district stands a modest detached house; a house that would be perfectly ordinary, were its wide windows not covered in neon green scribbles — half-finished equations, anatomies of computer architecture. They are marks left by the coders who use this place as a hide-out.
The troupe of five or so developers, clad in hoodies and jeans, have an air of Peter Pan’s lost boys. They may be young — in their early to mid-twenties — but these programmers are the heart of the most extraordinary financial story of recent months: cryptocurrencies, digital tokens with no intrinsic value, suddenly worth billions. I’m here to meet the coders’ leader, Vitalik Buterin, the Russian-Canadian creator of Ethereum, arguably the most successful of the hundreds of copycat cryptocurrencies to have emerged in the seven years since bitcoin rose to prominence. On the damp, overcast morning earlier this year when I take a Lyft car (an Uber equivalent) to his San Francisco headquarters, Ethereum’s market value was some $125bn — second only to bitcoin.
