Ethereum Co-creator Is World's Youngest Crypto Billionaire

27-year-old co-creator of the digital coin, Ethereum, is now the world's youngest crypto billionaire as the price of Eth surges. Last week, the second most valuable crypto, Ether, went up by over 350% year-to-date. On the 9th of May, at approximately 11:10 pm E.T., the coin surged past $4,000. This comes exactly one week after it broke the $3,000 milestone. While it cannot be compared to Bitcoin, it is holding its own.

This surge in price puts Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum's co-creator, on top of the list of the youngest known crypto billionaires. In 2018, Buterin disclosed his Ether address via his Twitter account, revealing that he holds about 333,521 ETH. At the price of $4,000 per ETH, this puts his crypto worth at about $1.33 billion. 

Today, at about 3:26 GMT, Ethereum touched $4,350 momentarily, putting its market capitalization at over $500 billion, about $20 billion more than the market cap of JPMorgan, the world's leading investment bank which has a market cap of $480 billion.

The market dominance of the ETH coin currently stands at around 19.6%, which is its highest level on record.

Part of the reason for Ethereum's rapid growth is due to increased interest in decentralized finance. Unlike Bitcoin which is only a store of value, the Ethereum blockchain can be used for decentralized operations in various areas from technology, to finance, and even healthcare.

Decentralized finance, popularly called DeFi is a general term referring to blockchain-based applications which are designed as a substitute for traditional financial intermediaries e.g. banks. The interest in DeFi is sending more and more users into owning assets not controlled or regulated by any central bank.

A blockchain is a list of records, like a ledger, which contains a record of all activities or transactions on the system. However, instead of storing this information in one central location, the information is copied and spread across a network of computers, so that when a new record is added, all computers connected to the blockchain automatically update to reflect this. All information on the blockchain is linked and can be viewed publicly.

Another factor is the recent attention NFTs have been getting. NFTs are linked to the Ethereum blockchain, created using the ERC-721 token standards, and the demand for ETH by users in order to pay for these non-fungible tokens might be contributing to the price surge.

The Ethereum blockchain has been congested for a while, and creators have announced upgrades to the system, which will increase the speed of transactions as well as reduce energy consumption, as crypto coins Bitcoin and Ethereum have come under criticisms for being environmentally unfriendly, due to high power-consumption rates. 

This upgrade is in the form of Ethereum 2.0, which is said to be faster, performing up to 20,000 transactions in a second, compared to the previous version which could only support about 20 transactions per second. The previous lag in transaction speed resulted to extremely high transaction fees on the blockchain. 

The Ethereum 2.0 also uses a technology that requires less power to validate transactions, efficiently lowering energy rates. All in all, Ethereum 2.0 is faster, and safer for users and the environment than the previous version.

Investment analysts are convinced Ethereum will continue to grow, going as far as saying it had the potential to touch $40,000 for one ETH.

If that happens, co-founder Buterin would be worth a mind-blowing $13.34 billion.

The Russian programmer founded Ethereum alongside Gavin Wood, who's a British developer and creator of another digital coin, Polkadot. The Ethereum blockchain has now grown to become the most used in the world.

Buterin is not the only crypto founder to make billions of their own coin. Anonymous Bitcoin founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, is estimated to have mined over a million BTC. At the current price of Bitcoin, this puts their worth above $50 billion.

Ethereum currently is trading at $4,048 while Bitcoin is down to $54,324, after reaching as high as $57,900 hours ago. Both coins are available on all major crypto exchanges like Binance and Coinbase.