The past year has been a wild ride for cryptocurrency investors. The volatility of the market has made some skeptics wonder if it is even possible to turn a profit. Others see the ride as exciting and see that there is plenty of money to be made. As proof, here are 19 billionaires who have made the majority of their money in the world of cryptocurrency and the technology that drives it.
Zhao’s net worth exceeds $65 billion. He’s a Canadian citizen and got his wealth from founding in Binance. He owns 70% of the company. He also holds other cryptocurrencies.
- Sam Bankman-Fried
Bankman-Fried’s net worth is $24 billion, and he earned it through founding FTX. He’s an American citizen who moved his headquarters from Hong Kong to the Bahamas in order to avoid taxes on his company.
- Brian Armstrong
Armstrong’s net worth is estimated at $6.6 billion. He’s the CEO and founder of Coinbase. He’s an American citizen and owns a $133 million mansion in Bel-Air. He gained notoriety in 2020 for telling employees they couldn’t talk politics at work.
- Gary Wang
Wang’s net worth is about $5.9 billion. He’s the CTO and co-founder of FTX. He owns 16% of the company. He previously worked as a software engineer for Google. While at Google he worked on a platform for booking flights.
- Chris Larsen
Larsen’s net worth is close to $4.3 billion. He earned it as the co-founder and CEO of Ripple. As of April 2022, Ripple is the eighth-largest cryptocurrency by market value. Larsen is also a climate activist who decries Bitcoin’s carbon-heavy mining practices.
- Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss
The Winklevoss brothers got a settlement from Zuckerberg. They turned the $65 million into $4 billion each by purchasing bitcoin in 2012.
- Song Chi-hyung
South Korea’s Chi-hyung’s net worth is about $3.7 billion.
- Barry Silbert
Silbert’s net worth is estimated at $3.2 billion. He founded Digital Currency Group Inc.
- Jed McCaleb
McCaleb’s net worth is around $2.5 billion. He got his wealth through the payment-focused XRP and Ripple Labs, which he co-founded in 2012.
- Nikil Viswanathan and Joseph Lau
These two co-founders of Alchemy met while they were both teaching assistants for a computer science class. Each is worth an estimated $2.4 billion.
- Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah
These gentlemen co-founded Open Sea. They pivoted to NFTs a few years later. Each has a net worth of around $2.2 billion.
- Fred Ehrsam
Ehrsam’s net worth of $2.1 billion comes from Coinbase. He now runs Paradigm, but he maintains a 6% ownership of Coinbase. Before cryptocurrency was a thing, he was an exchange trader for Goldman Sachs.
- Kim Hyoung-nyon
Hyoung-nyon’s net worth of $1.9 billion is from Upbit. He’s the executive VP and owns about 13% of the company.
- Michael Saylor
Saylor’s net worth of $1.6 billion is from MicroStrategy.
- Matthew Roszak
Roszak has a net worth of nearly $1.4 billion from Bitcoin investments.
- Tim Draper
Draper’s net worth is about $1.2 billion from cryptocurrency investments.