Vitalik Buterin has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel due to his “outstanding achievements in the fields of cryptocurrencies, smart contracts and the design of institutions.”
The Faculty of Business and Economics awarded the doctorate to the 24-year-old. The announcement of Dr Buterin was made on the university’s Twitter page earlier today. It noted that the Russian-Canadian programmer:
“…makes ground-breaking contribution to promoting decentralisation and equal participation in the digital revolution. He is an exceptionally creative and innovative thinker who has been instrumental in shaping the digital revolution from an early age.”
Aleksander Berentsen, professor of economic theory, noted Buterin’s response to being awarded his doctorate online. Buterin said:
“I’m honored to have received an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel, the oldest University of Switzerland. Switzerland is well known for its innovative blockchain research.”
It was on the 5th December, 2013 that the Ethereum whitepaper was first released. The paper, “Ethereum: A Next Generation Smart Contract & Decentralized Application Platform,” has only been around for nearly five years. However, in that time, it has managed to create a platform for decentralised software applications.
Some of the applications and platforms already built on Ethereum include Metamask, Civic, the Ethereum Name Service, Golem, Decentraland, Ethlance, the Bounties Network, Gnosis, Ujo, CryptoKitties, FunFair, AirSwap, Bancor, MakerDAO, 0x, and Melonport, to name but a small few.
Yet around the world many more are being developed, with developers working on the next decentralised applications to further demonstrate the potential of Ethereum.
The creation and launch of CryptoKitties was the first dApp that highlighted the need for Ethereum to find a solution to scale. Back in December, it was reported that the virtual cat game accounted for around 13 per cent of the network’s transactions, meaning that initial coin offerings (ICOs) were unable to launch on its protocol due to congestion.
Despite this, though, work continues on the network, with developers working on Ethereum 1x, which is reported to help increase scaling.