The crypto assets of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin are now valued at over $1 billion thanks to the rise of ETH price above $3000.

The dollar value of Vitalik Buterin's assets stored at his disclosed address in 2018 exceeded $1 billion. Currently, 333 520 ETH are stored on this wallet. The second known address of Buterin stores another 897 ETH and various ERC-20 tokens worth approximately $5.6 million at the current exchange rate.

Buterin became the youngest cryptocurrency billionaire. Vitalik is 27 years old. Prior to that, the youngest cryptocurrency billionaire was Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX derivatives platform.

Ethereum hit its all-time high on May 4, surpassing $3400. Since the beginning of the year, the coin rose in price by 360%.

Ethereum's growth is associated not only with the inflow of institutional capital, but also with the growing number of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications built on the Ethereum blockchain.

Over the past day, traders lost $530 million amid the growth of Ethereum. Crypto exchanges forcibly closed the short positions of users who bet on ETH price decrease. One of the traders supposedly lost $74 million.

“Thousands of developers are building applications that recreate traditional financial products in decentralized ways on top of Ethereum, and as more and more users pour in to interact with these apps, they require ETH (ether) to conduct any transaction,” Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of smart contract network Chainlink, said.

“Second, there seems to be growing institutional interest in the public Ethereum blockchain, as stakeholders play around with ways to leverage the public network.”

In April, the European Investment Bank announced that it had issued the first digital bonds on the public Ethereum blockchain.