This blog is a part of the series around Naval Ravikanth’s podcast episode that featured Ethereum’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin. You can access the links to all the blog posts written around the podcast episode here. In this blog, we discuss how Ethereum began.

Lets trace the inception of Ethereum while briefly touching upon the personal background of Vitalik and how he came about inventing the uber-popular chain.

Vitalik first came across Bitcoin when he was in high school, and was immediately fascinated by it. He was fascinated by both computers and math from a very early age. As a matter of fact, Vitalik started programming at the age of ten.

When Vitalik found that Bitcoin is a combination of cryptography and computer science, he was hooked. It also helped that Bitcoin was open-source and aligned with his political philosophy. One thing led to another, and Vitalik started working for a blog while accepting pay in BTC back in the day. Then at a later occasion, the founder of Bitcoin Magazine brought Vitalik on board as the first writer for the magazine.

Lots of writing and reading around Bitcoin, along with steady involvement in programming projects helped Vitalik broaden his horizons in the realm of Bitcoin. With a desire to learn more about the community, he set out on a long journey, midway through university, to catch up with various Bitcoin communities across the world.

A few months down the lane, he stumbled upon the “Covert Coins” project which was trying to figure out a way to use blockchain technology to issue other assets on top of it. Along the way, he also got acquainted with a project known as “Master Coin” which was trying to accomplish what modern DeFi projects are doing today.

The time Vitalik spent with Covert Coins and Master Coin projects, along with the insights he gathered from his time with various Blockchain communities, paved the way for Ethereum. Because Vitalik realized that there was a need to build a general-purpose blockchain which would facilitate a range of applications. This would do away with the need for creating a new blockchain network for each use case.

So in summary, Ethereum’s genesis was a result of Vitalik’s understanding of the blockchain ecosystem back then (around 2010 to 2015). This is because in essence, Ethereum was built as a multi-purpose blockchain that could support various applications and use cases, sustainably.

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