Who Founded $ETH ??

Ethereum was founded by Vitalik Buterin, a Russian-Canadian programmer and writer, in late 2013. Buterin had been involved in the cryptocurrency community since 2011, co-founding and writing for Bitcoin Magazine. He saw potential in Bitcoin's underlying blockchain technology but believed it could be used for more than just digital currency. This vision led him to propose Ethereum, a decentralized platform that supports smart contracts—self-executing contracts with the terms directly written into code.

Buterin’s proposal, outlined in a white paper, described a blockchain with a built-in programming language, allowing developers to create decentralized applications (dApps). Unlike Bitcoin, which is limited to financial transactions, Ethereum's flexible platform could be used for various applications, from decentralized finance (DeFi) to supply chain management and beyond.

To bring Ethereum to life, Buterin assembled a team of co-founders including Gavin Wood, who wrote the Ethereum Yellow Paper defining the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM); Joseph Lubin, who later founded ConsenSys, a company focusing on building Ethereum-based software; and several others like Mihai Alisie, Anthony Di Iorio, and Charles Hoskinson.

In early 2014, Ethereum was publicly announced and a crowdfunding campaign was conducted through an initial coin offering (ICO), raising over $18 million in Bitcoin. This funding was used to develop the Ethereum platform, which officially launched on July 30, 2015, with the release of its first version, "Frontier."

Since its launch, Ethereum has grown to become the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and has fostered a vibrant ecosystem of developers and applications, making it a cornerstone of the blockchain and cryptocurrency world.