Vitalik Buterin Publishes Ethereum Whitepaper

Vitalik Buterin created Ethereum with the Ethereum Whitepaper, marking a pivotal shift in the story of blockchains. This new chain offered several innovations and improvements on Bitcoin and, most importantly for this story—the story of art—the chain’s introduction of smart contracts would lead the way to NFTs and digital ownership.

Ethereum’s introduction of smart contracts aimed to decentralize internet applications by enabling developers to build decentralized applications (dApps). Several years later, the ERC-721 Token Standard would implement an API for tokens within smart contracts that allowed for the functionality digital artists had been seeking for decades—and what ascribe and the McCoys had envisioned—transfer and ownership of digital assets. This breakthrough had many critical predecessors but still stands as one of the more significant moments in this story of generative art.

Prior to Ethereum, Buterin was already a recognized figure in the crypto community, having co-founded Bitcoin Magazine and contributed to crypto research. Alongside Buterin, key figures like Dr. Gavin Wood, who developed Ethereum’s Solidity programming language, Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson and Joseph Lubin significantly shaped Ethereum’s early stages. Ethereum’s vision materialized with its presentation at the 2014 North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami (2014), followed by a successful ICO that raised approximately $18 million in Bitcoin, setting a robust foundation for its development.