According to some, the idea of Ethereum was born in 2009, when Bitcoin became the first practical solution of decentralization. Undoubtedly, the success of Blockchain greatly influenced Vitalik Buterin, the man behind Ethereum. However, 2012 would be a more particular date. That is when Vitalik left the University of Waterloo to travel the world while participating in various cryptocurrency innovations. While on this trip, Buterin conceived the Ethereum idea; a crypto economically secured platform for creating any kind of decentralized application.
After that, Vitalik started drafting the Ethereum Whitepaper. The document justified the idea of a new crypto technology, stated its main principles, and possible applications. The whitepaper was published in 2013, and a month later, Buterin announced the beginning of Ethereum project during the Bitcointalk forum. In his post, Vitalik said that he was working with Jeffrey Wilcke and Dr. Gavin Wood as principle core developers. Wood took the main part in Ethereum creation after Vitalik. His Yellow Paper (the formal specification of Ethereum Virtual Machine) was published in April 2014. Coding its very first practical implementation in seven programming languages, this was the development of the first prototype of Ethereum platform. Just like Ethereum, Bitcoin is based on Blockchain technology, but this means nothing if it is not backed by the most powerful network in history. Investors channeled millions of dollars into Bitcoin, using the money on trading, mining equipment, and technologies. Launching a network like that demands the same amount (or more) of effort. To kick-start a group of investors, miners, and developers, the Ethereum foundation chose to carry out a pre-sale of more than 60M digital tokens (Ethers). The campaign ended up being a major success.
