The 12 Richest People In Crypto
People Who Became Billionaires Because of Crypto
It’s no secret. You can find all of this information on Forbes where they list billionaires. If you want to check it out, you are more than welcome to do so here.
What we will be doing here is listing Top 12 richest people who became billionaires because of crypto and a little bit of history about them and how they made their money.
#12 Matthew Roszak
Mathew is 49 years old with roughly $1 billion net worth. He is the co-founder of Bloq, which basically offers infrastructure and applications for Web3 space with focus on DeFi, Mining, and Metaverse. He is also a venture capitalist and was a founder of Tally Capital, a private investment firm focused on blockchain-enabled technology.
Although we can say that most of his wealth was created from Bloq, he has been rich before that too.
#11 Fred Ehrsam
Fred is 34 years old with roughly $1 billion net worth. He is one of the co-founders of Coinbase. Although, as of now, he is not part of Coinbase anymore, he still owns roughly 6% of its stock. He is also a co-founder of Paradigm, an investment firm which focuses on supporting crypto/web3 companies and protocols.
Most of his wealth was created after he started working for Coinbase, although he was pretty successful as a trader with Goldman Sachs.
#10 Jed McCaleb
Jed is 47 years old with roughly $2.5 billion net worth. He was the founder of Mt. Gox, a Bitcoin exchange early in 2010 where he sold it right before the hack happened. After that, he was a co-founder of Ripple and then left, although he still owns more than 3.4 billion XRP (Ripple). Current XRP price is $0.336, so more than a billion of his net worth comes from XRP.
#9 Barry Silbert
Barry is 46 years old with roughly $2.6 billion net worth. He is the founder and CEO of Digital Currency Group, a venture capital company focusing on the digital currency market (it includes CoinDesk, Foundry, Genesis, Grayscale Investments, and Luno). Although, he made most of his money from DCG, he was successful prior to that. He built and sold a trading platform back in 2015.
#8 Brian Armstrong
Brian is 39 years old with roughly $2.8 billion net worth. He is a co-founder of Coinbase who currently serves as CEO of the company. Coinbase it is one of the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States. He still owns roughly 19% of the Coinbase stock. Current market cap for Coinbase is ~$15 billion ($15B*0.19=$2.8 billion). All his wealth comes from Coinbase.
Coinbase made him and Fred Ehrsam billionaires.
#7 Chris Larsen
Chris is 62 years old with roughly $2.9 billion net worth. He is a co-founder of Ripple, together with Jed McCaleb. Ripple was developed back in 2012 with the intent to facilitate payment process for banking leveraging on blockchain technology. He was successful prior to Coinbase. He has built platforms before and sold.
#6 & #5 / Tyler Winklevoss / Cameron Winklevoss
Tyler and Cameron are 41 years old with roughly $3.3 billion net worth each. They are identical twins, co-founders of Gemini, a cryptocurrency exchange. He and his brother accused Mark Zuckerberg that he stole their idea to build a social network. There was a legal settlement where Mark Zuckerberg paid them $65 million. They were smart enough to invest in Bitcoin back then.
Most of their wealth came after their investment in Bitcoin with the settlement money they got from Facebook.
#4 Song Chi-hyung
Song is 43 years old with roughly $3.4 billion net worth. He is the founder of Dunamu, a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange. They handle roughly $4.7 billion in daily transactions. Btw, South Korea is massive in crypto space.
#3 Gary Wang
Gary is 29 years old with roughly $5.8 billion net worth. He is a co-founder of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange. He currently serves as CTO of the company as well. He owns 16% of the exchange. FTX raised money on $32 billion valuation back in Jan 2022, so $5.1 billion of his net worth is coming from FTX.
#2 Changpeng Zhao
Changpeng is 44 years old with roughly $17.4 billion net worth. He is the founder and serves currently as CEO for Binance. Binance is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world (roughly $40B trading volume daily). He was successful prior to Binance, although most of his wealth was created from Binance.
#1 Sam Bankman-Fried
Sam is 30 years old with roughly $20.3 billion net worth. He is the richest person in crypto space. He is the founder of FTX exchange (together with Gary Wang). He was a trader prior to founding FTX. He started crypto trading back in 2017 where he found an arbitrage opportunity.
His arbitrage opportunity was really simple. He figured out that Bitcoin at that time was selling $10k in US while in Japan it was going for $11.5k worth of Japanese yen. So he would convert that amount back to dollars, then it would wire transfer that money and keep doing this process over and over. As per Sam’s comment, he was getting 10% daily returns which turned out to be extremely profitable.
He has been going absolutely wild with the current crashes in the crypto space. We wrote a couple of articles on this before, he helped BlockFi survive. There were even some rumors that FTX might buy Robinhood.
So what’s the lesson learned from all this?
Not sure if you noticed the pattern. Besides Mathew Roszak and Barry Silbert, all of them were cryptocurrency exchange founders. You would think that people make a lot of money trading, and probably some of them do. But where you make money most is when you serve as a intermediary when those exchanges happen. Just like banks do.
Yes, trading with crypto might be successful sometimes but if you are really interested to build wealth, start building things in web3 space.
Btw, we are still working on a Guide To Become A Web3 Developer, if interested on that, let us know at newsletter@web3lunch.com.