Forbes Unveils its First Ever Cryptocurrency Rich List
Crypto wealth has this week drawn the attention of the biggest financial reporter.
World-renowned for their yearly billionaire-list, Forbes has released a report detailing the richest people in the crypto space. It’s a move that goes one step further to legitimizing cryptocurrencies on the mainstream economic stage.
The list features both innovators and institutional investors, and perhaps not surprisingly the average age of the list is 42, a whole 27 years younger than Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans at 67.
Here’s the top ten according to Forbes.
Chris Larsen
$7.5-8b
It’s no surprise to anyone who saw Ripple’s parabolic rise last year that the coins key players made this list. According to Forbes however Larsen weighs in at a staggering $7.5-8b, due to his personal holdings of 5.2 billion XRP. As former CEO and now executive chairman he has profited highly from the project that brought blockchain tech to the banking system.
Joseph Lubin
$1-5b
Cofounder of Ethereum and founder of Consensys, the success of both platforms has launched the Toronto native from his Goldman Sachs roots to even greater wealth.
The CEO of the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, comes in at number 3. With over 6 million users the platform has netted Zhao an estimated $1.1-2 billion.
The twin brothers achieved their lofty heights by investing millions in Bitcoin in 2012. The protocol’s huge surge in price puts the pair somewhere in the $1b dollar range, and they now operate the New York crypto exchange Gemini.
The heir to a banking fortune, Mellon’s bet on Ripple paid off big, catapulting his crypto wealth to close to a billion dollars. He chose Ripple because “Crypto is scary and dark. it’s anti-America….I am pro-America, pro-business and pro-bank. That’s why I went with Ripple”, Forbes reports, earmarking Mellon as one of the players here for solely for financial and not ideological reasons.
The CEO of Coinbase has done exceptionally well creating the user-friendly portal between the fiat and crypto realms. Last year the service allegedly reached its target of $600m annual revenue.
Roszak too made big bucks off his early Bitcoin and ICO investments, getting involved in 2011. He then moved to Tally Capital, a blockchain start-up fund that has launched over twenty projects, including exchanges Coinbase and Kraken.
Di Iorio was an early investor in the hugely successful Ethereum network, and has since diversified his crypto profits, aiming to get in early on newer coins, including VeChain and Qtum.
Pierce was an early investor in a range of cryptocurrencies, including Mastercoin and Ethereum. He has made public plans to donate $1b to a DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation).
Novogratz was a hedge fund manager who suffered huge losses in the 2008 financial crisis. His investments and trading in the crypto space led to a huge rebound in wealth, and he is now working on Galaxy Digital, a crypto bank operating in Canada.
