Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin joins Joe Biden and Billie Eilish on Time's 100 most influential people list
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- Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin is one of the world's most influential people, according to Time magazine.
- He was named on the prestigious list alongside US President Joe Biden and pop superstar Billie Eilish.
- Buterin's inclusion is a sign of the growing power of cryptocurrencies, which have boomed in 2021.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin has been named on Time magazine's prestigious list of the world's 100 most influential people, six years after founding the booming blockchain and cryptocurrency.
In a sign of the growing power of crypto, Buterin appears on the 2021 edition of the long-running list alongside US President Joe Biden and pop superstar Billie Eilish.
Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian wrote Buterin's profile for the magazine, saying: "What makes Vitalik so special … is that he is a builder's builder.
"No one person could've possibly come up with all of the uses for ethereum, but it did take one person's idea to get it started."
Buterin came up with the idea for ethereum - a cryptocurrency network upon which decentralized apps can be built - in 2013, after being introduced to bitcoin by his dad. The network was developed by Buterin and seven others, and launched in 2015.
As the cofounder of the second-biggest cryptocurrency after bitcoin he is a highly respected figure in the crypto world, and has racked up 2.4 million Twitter followers.
Ethereum's native cryptocurrency ether has soared over the last year during a crypto boom and thanks to growing excitement about the network's uses. It had a market capitalization of $426 billion on Thursday, according to Coinmarketcap.
Ohanian wrote that he's "never been more excited about the potential of the internet, and that's largely thanks to Vitalik Buterin." The Reddit cofounder cited non-fungible tokens - tradable crypto collectors' items that largely run on ethereum - as one reason for his excitement.
Fellow cryptocurrency enthusiast and Tesla CEO Elon Musk was also named on Time's list, as were Apple boss Tim Cook and Nvidia chief Jensen Huang.