- >News
- >Vitalik Buterin Net Worth 2024: Exploring the Riches of Ethereum’s Co-Founder
Vitalik Buterin Net Worth 2024: Exploring the Riches of Ethereum’s Co-Founder
Vitalik Buterin is well-known within the cryptocurrency community as one of the co-founders of Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain by market cap. Seeing as Ethereum is the second most valuable crypto asset by market cap, it should be no surprise that Vitalik Buterin’s net worth is over $650 million dollars.
We’ll break down Vitalik’s net worth later on, but first, let’s talk about who Vitalik Buterin is.
Who is Vitalik Buterin?
Vitalik Buterin is a Russian-Canadian born in Kolomna, a district of Moscow, the Russian capital, on January 31, 1994. He emigrated with his family to Canada at the age of six, going to a private school in Toronto before going to the University of Waterloo where he took advanced courses and worked with a cryptographer named Ian Goldberg.
Buterin learned about Bitcoin from his father, who was a computer scientist, at the age of 17, and in 2011 Buterin became the co-founder and lead writer for Bitcoin Magazine. It was out of Buterin’s interest in Bitcoin that Ethereum was born. He felt that Bitcoin needed a scripting language to support applications, but was unable to find support within the Bitcoin community at the time.
In the fall of 2013, while Buterin was still in university, he published the first Ethereum whitepaper, outlining his vision for a platform with a scripting language to allow for application development. In 2014, he received a $100,000 grant from the Thiel Fellowship, a venture capital fund run by Peter Thiel, and he dropped out of university to begin working on Ethereum full-time.
How Much Ethereum Does Buterin Own?
So how rich is Vitalik Buterin? How does Vitalik Buterin make money? Well, the reality is that his net worth and how he makes money are almost exclusively tied to the current price of Ethereum. It is the asset that he holds in the largest quantity, as you might expect from one of the founders. As with the other cryptocurrencies that Buterin holds, in order to determine how much Ethereum he has we need to cross-reference and add various wallets together.
When we add up his various “VB” wallets and his Vitalik.eth domain wallet address, Vitalik Buterin has over 270k Ethereum to his name. This amounts to almost the entirety of his over $650 million net worth, as that is over $640 million alone.
Vitalik’s net worth will only rise if and when Ethereum’s price action trends up again, but it’s not the only asset he holds.
What Other Cryptocurrencies Does Vitalik Buterin Hold?
As aforementioned, though it takes some digging and cross-referencing of the various Ethereum wallet addresses that Vitalik Buterin has, thanks to the transparency of blockchain we can see exactly what other digital assets he has. There are quite a few assets that aren’t worth noting, so we’ll stick to the assets he holds within the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap. Many projects simply send him assets like Shiba Inu did (more on this later), leading him to have a variety of high balances of small-cap assets.
How much money does Vitalik Buterin have? Well if you total up his Ethereum balance, along with the balances we’ll note below and the variety of other NFTs and smaller-cap cryptocurrencies he owns, he has well over $650 million. Here are some of his most notable non-ETH holdings:
Ethereum Naming Service (ENS): As you might expect from someone who’s using an Ethereum domain, Buterin also holds ENS across a couple of his wallets. Buterin has just under 1500 units of ENS worth a little over $25k USD at current prices.
USD Coin (USDC): Buterin holds a little over $30k in USDC across a couple of wallets.
Uniswap (UNI): The governance asset of Uniswap exchange, Buterin holds exactly 1400 UNI in one of his wallets. That amount is worth a little over $8,500 USD.
Wrapped Ethereum (WETH):Wrapped Ethereum is necessary for interaction with lots of various Ethereum decentralized finance applications, so it makes sense that Buterin holds some in addition to his regular ETH. Buterin holds over 180 units of WETH, which amounts to about $435k USD at current prices.
OMG Network (OMG): Though not a top 100 cryptocurrency by market cap, OMG has long been a favorite project of Buterin, and he holds it in multiple wallets. He holds over 130k units of OMG worth over $85k USD.
Other Facts About Vitalik Buterin
Vitalik actually founded Ethereum with two other well-known names within the cryptocurrency sector, Dr. Gavin Woods and Charles Hoskinson. Woods is known for coining the term Web3, but also for his work on the Polkadot (DOT) blockchain network. Hoskinson on the other hand, is known for founding the Cardano (ADA) blockchain network. Both networks aim to be competitors to Ethereum.
Buterin is also quite well-known for his philanthropy. When Shiba Inu (SHIB) was created, the founders sent half of the initial supply to Buterin. In 2021, Buterin donated over $1 billion in SHIB to CryptoRelief to help with the rising COVID-19 problem in India. He also donated over $300 million in Dogelon Mars, another memecoin, to the Methuselah Foundation in 2021.
In 2018, Buterin donated over $2 million in ETH to the SENS Research Foundation (SRF), which is a nonprofit focused on diseases of aging.
More recently, with the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, Buterin created the UkraineDAO, which helps support those in the Ukraine affected by war. The UkraineDAO has received over $5 million in ETH donations since its creation.
Conclusion
Vitalik Buterin is certainly one of the richest crypto holders in the world, especially as an individual. It’s interesting to see just how much of Buterin’s net worth is directly tied to the price of Ethereum, as it encompasses well over 95% of his portfolio when you take into account all his different wallet addresses. Of course, we didn’t even discuss the value of his NFTs, of which he has quite a few tied to each wallet, but it’s a foregone conclusion that Buterin is doing quite well financially. Should Ethereum get back to its previous all-time highs, he’ll be doing even better.
