Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, was named a billionaire in May 2021 by Forbes.
Buterin was named the youngest cryptocurrency billionaire at the age of 27, because his wallet at the time had 333,500 Ether.
He managed to reach that height, after creating Ethereum back in 2013, when he was only 19 years old.
And this time, after a year named a billionaire, Buterin has lost the prestigious title.
Buterin owns a digital wallet that contained holdings worth about $1.5 billion in November 2021.
But when the cryptocurrency market is generally crashing, the sluggish bear market has dragged Buterin's net worth to below the billion dollar mark.
(btw btw I'm not a billionaire anymore)
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) May 20, 2022
The Ethereum’s co-founder's announcement came in response to a tweet which read, "People have been trying to psychoanalyze Elon Musk + Jeff Bezos's recent tweet activity. What does it mean? Are they well? It's not that complicated. People just like posting. Billionaires too. Posting is great and people love doing it, especially when they get lots of attention."
Buterin replied saying, "What happened to 'talking directly to the people' being a virtue? (btw I particularly appreciate that Elon and Jeff actually respond to people, and don't just shout their own stuff)."
In a following tweet, Buterin added that he is not a billionaire anymore.
It should be noted that Ethereum, considered the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization after Bitcoin, has lost about half its value in the past six months and is about 60% below its record high of $69,000.
It's also worth noting though, that Buterin's net worth is also affected by his philanthropic deeds.
For example, Buterin has sent Shiba Inu and other cryptocurrency donations to various foundations, charities and non-profits, including 50 trillion SHIB, around $1.2 billion at the time, to the India Covid Crypto Relief Fund.
He later burned about 90% of his remaining SHIB tokens.
Read: The Fall Of The Terra-Luna Cryptocurrency That Wiped $45 Billion In Just One Week
Buterin was born in 1994 in the small town of Kolomna, which is around 100 km from Russia's capital Moscow.
When he was young, Buterin was obsessed with his studies. He recalls his parents wanted him to also learn the piano and skiing. However, Buterin was more interested in programming, and at the age of ten, he began coding.
“I started coding when I was five or six years old. But, I only got serious about it at the age of ten or twelve. I started writing different kinds of games. I had an old Windows 95 computer and a book about programming in C++ with Allegro [...]. That’s where it all started,” Buterin said.
“When I was in grade five or six, I just remember quite a lot of people were always talking about me like I was some kind of math genius. And there were just so many moments when I realized, like, okay, why can’t I just be like some normal person and go have a 75% average like everyone else.”
This was when Buterin learned about Bitcoin from his father, Dmitry, who was a computer scientist.
“Dad told me about this interesting currency that no government or no central bank could control. My first thought was: ‘How can such a system exist when it’s just numbers in a computer? How much value can they have?’ Three weeks later, I came across Bitcoin online and decided to explore the topic in more depth,” Vitalik said.
It was in 2013 that Buterin devised the concept of the Ethereum blockchain platform and cryptocurrency, and it was in 2015 that Ethereum was first launched to the public.
Buterin said that cryptocurrencies in general are "in a bubble," but it is difficult to predict when it will burst.
"It could be over by now ... It could be over in months ," Buterin once said.
One of the reasons for Ethereum massive growth and increasing popularity, is because it is used in NFT (Non-Fungible Token) transactions, which is at this time, is still a sensation.
Read: Bitcoin Price Plummets To More Than Half Of What It Was Months Before
