Russian-Canadian programmer Vitalik Buterin first introduced the idea of Ethereum in his white paper in 2013 with the aim of building decentralised applications. Buterin believed that there was a necessity in a scripting language for applications and offered to develop a new platform. Buterin recruited several other specialists as co-founders of his own currency, and the first sale of ETH tokens took place in the summer of 2014. Сlose to $18 million was raised as a result.