In brief
The jailing of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny last month unleashed a tide of protest around the world. But it touched an especially painful splinter at the heart of one prominent Russian emigre, Dmitry Buterin, who resolved to do something about the tragedy.
Buterin is the father of Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, whose revolutionary blockchain platform reached a record market cap of $196 billion lastweek. Ethereums decentralized, transparent, censorship-resistant ethos is the very antithesis of the world Buterin senior left behind.
So last week he tweeted a heartfelt plea to his followers to retweet Navalnys video and asked the Ethereum community in Russia to set up donations toward the cause. The video details the widespread and systematic corruption perpetrated by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his cronies, over twenty years.
Dmitry Buterin loathes Putin: He's KGB, and those are the people who tortured and killed millions of Russians and Ukrainians. Can we trust him? he said recently, during a call with Decrypt.
These days, his home is in the heart of Toronto, and has two young daughters who are Vitaliks halfsisters. The citys CNN tower was visible in the background, as he spoke about his Russian heritage, his approach to raising the boy who would create Ethereum, and whyunlike in 2017, when ETH reached its previous all-time-highthis time, its different.
The man who raised Ethereums genius inventor has myriad interests, which span from spirituality to software, aging, parenting, and of course Putin. He has strong views on all of it, though his Twitter personahe has 13,000 followerstends to come off as warm and fuzzy and light-hearted, even when he gently spars with Twitter troll Udi Wertheimer, a notorious Ethereum skeptic. The social media version differs from the man in person (on Zoom) who projects a steelier, more guarded core.
Buterin was born in 1972 in the Chechen capital of Grozny, in Russias wild, southern reaches. As a child, he was bombarded with incessant propagandabrainwashed people, the dregs of the cult of Lenin, he said. He endured the usual shortages of toilet paper and other essentials, as well as the low-level corruption and duplicity that permeated life in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. It did not make him love his country.
Dmitry Buterin said that his upbringing made him ideologically predisposed toward Ethereum, which is aligned with my deeply-seated passion for openness, transparency, [and] freedom. Because of growing up in the Soviet Union, and seeing the authoritarian regime and their oppression and their bigotry, for me, decentralized systems hold so much promise for us building a better future.
But it was in the Soviet Union, in Grozny, where a friendly neighbor named Vitaly helped him develop his early interest in electronics. At 17, the aspiring young software developer and entrepreneur moved to the Russian capital to study Computer Science at the Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering.
After graduation, he married Natalia Ameline, a Cybernetics student at the National Research University of Electronic Technology. He worked as a software engineer and then a business consultant, while the couple lived in Kolomna, a city-suburb, some 70 miles southeast of Moscow. Thats where their only child, a son, Vitalik was born in 1994.
Dmitry said that the boy was named after the man that helped further his knowledge of electronics. Then he laughed dryly and said that maybe [Ameline] would have a very different recollection.
Three years after his son was born, Buterin senior co-founded his first business, a financial software reseller, and consultancy, and has been a serial entrepreneur ever since. Hes the founder of three multi-million dollar businesses, including management software startup Wild Apricot, which was sold to US software giant Personify in 2017.
Unlike the vast majority of Russians, Buterins business interests allowed him to travel abroad (to what he calls the normal world.) And when Vitalik was six, the family of three left Russia for good.
Though Dmitry and Ameline subsequently divorced, they run an educational blockchain platform, BlockGeeks, together. Dmitry Buterin also invests in and mentors various blockchain start-ups; Ameline is a co-founder of the educational nonprofit CryptoChicks.
Extended familyDmitrys brother and parentssoon followed them to Canada. Vitalik lived mostly with him, said Dmitry, who later remarried and now has two young daughters.
Putin came to power shortly after the Buterins leftthe start of a two-decade rule that would see Russia gradually diminish in international standing, due to a combination of human-rights atrocities, economic mismanagement, and the erosion of democracy.
Buterin has written about the danger of bestowing ones trauma on a child. He spoke about that in our interview and was careful to point out that his own trauma was more existential than anything else. Those kinds of unprocessed emotions and storiesthink about it as a splinter stuck in you, he said. Your mind is trying to protect you from touching that splinter.
Dmitry Buterin said he tried to protect his young son from the splinter, too. When Vitalik initially appeared to be slow learning to speak, Dmitry, a harsh critic of heavy-handed attempts to fix kids, was unperturbed: You know, they're not broken. They just have this uniqueness. And that uniqueness is expressed in different ways, he said.
Vitaliks way, it turned out, was math, creating numeric patterns, and playing with Excel, even before he left Russia. By nine or 10 he was already programming video games.
Vitalik Buterin was 19 when he invented a decentralized computing platform that is revolutionizing finance. The platform, which relies on smart contracts, was Vitaliks response to the limitations of Bitcoin, which Dmitry introduced him to when he was 17. It seeks to go above and beyond and enables any decentralized, censorship-resistant application imaginable.
ETH, the second most popular crypto-token, has seen year-to-date gains of around 140%, compared with Bitcoins 30%, and analysts are betting the upside trend will continue. But for Dmitry Buterin, its just a number, albeit one thats indicative of all the ongoing progress the platform has made. It's really just a small indication of society, the markets, recognizing all of the incredible stuff that has been happening and has been built on Ethereum, he said.
In the five years since it was launched, tens of thousands of developers have built on Ethereum; its spawned an ecosystem that spans decentralized finance, collectiblesknown as NFTssocial tokens, and more. But Buterin senior believes that the caliber of people building on the platform his son created is its biggest asset.
I was very confident, always, in the success of Ethereum, because I know the kind of people who are involved, he said.
Hes not hands-on involved with Ethereum but has kept a watchful eye on its progress.
Now, as I follow [the] DeFi space and all the different projects and tokens, I'm less inclined to do deep technical analysis, but I'm fascinated to get a sense of people, he said and named DeFi projects Aave, MakerDAO, and Synthetix as some of his personal picks.
This isnt the first time interest in Ethereum has reached a fever pitch. In 2017, its fundraising approach, the ICO, was aped by thousands of crypto startups. The boom saw ETH reach a high of almost $1,400 in December that year.
But, by the start of 2018, the idea that cryptocurrency was a golden ticket had been replaced by uncertainty and confusion about the future of digital money. Many ICO-backed companies failed or were scammy, resulting in a flurry of SEC suits.
[Vitalik] had a lot of concerns about all of these crazy ICOs, said Dmitry Buterin. He also carried a lot of anxiety about all of these things that Ethereum still has to solve." In a December 2017 tweet about the crypto market's new record market cap, the young Buterin implied that success had come too easily.
But now, three years later, Dmitry Buterin feels that the ecosystem and the Ethereum community may have turned the corner.
When I now look at [Vitaliks] communications and our text exchanges, I think that he's much, much happier, much more confident with all of the stuff that's been happening with Ethereum, he said.
Some of thats down to steady progress with the platforms major upgrade, Ethereum 2.0, which will see it transition from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake blockchaina boon for its scalability prospects, and a potential answer to the problem of escalating fees.
But Dmitry Buterin believes that Ethereum is succeeding because useful projects such as Aave and Chainlink are finally being built: We have way more substance now than we had in 2018, he said. All of these things are now coming to fruition.
He has plenty of company in his optimism, of course. Ethereum is having a major moment, blowing through one all-time high after another having reached $1,752. The price of Ether rose an astounding 400% in the past six months.
During that same period, the prodigal son, Vitalik, has been in Singapore where hes taken a step back from his unofficial leadership role, according to his dad: In the beginning of [2020], he was much more hands-on in a lot of research and cryptography and there is much less of that stuff on his own plate right now, just because there are so many other wonderful, smart, amazing people involved.
Instead, Vitalik has found more time for abstract and philosophical thinking. He's connecting the dots on a higher level, the level of systems and the way [they interact with] society and humans, said the elder Buterin. The father sounded especially proud of his son for that.
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Meet the Father of the Father of Ethereum - Decrypt
