The CEOs of exchanges and mining giants have made a fortune on cryptocurrency. We tell you who made money from the conflict with Facebook and how much BTC is in the wallet of the most wealthy investor whose name no one knows.
On December 24, 2022, Forbes magazine reported that the combined wealth of the world's 17 richest crypto-billionaires had plummeted by $116 billion since the beginning of the year, with some of them going completely bankrupt and others losing their previous status.
In March 2022, according to Forbes, Changpeng Zhao, the founder and CEO of one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, Binance, was at the top of the list, who owns the most bitcoin worth of $65 billion; in December 2022, his capital was $4.5 billion. One of the reasons behind the plunge was the collapse of the FTX trading platform. Its founder Sam Banckman-Fried went bankrupt: his fortune plummeted from $24bn to nil. Another FTX co-founder, Gary Wang, also lost his crypto-billionaire status: he lost all of the $5.9bn he owned in March 2022.
Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, has seen his fortune quadruple between March and December 2022, from $6 billion to $1.5 billion. Chris Larsen, co-founder and chairman of cryptocurrency payments platform Ripple, lost more than $2 billion: his capital dropped from $4.3 billion to $2.1 billion. Brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who founded the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, said goodbye to most of their wealth: it fell from $4 billion to $1.1 billion each. Barry Silbert, head of cryptocurrency conglomerate Digital Currency Group, lost his $3.2bn in total.
As noted, a total of ten people from the Forbes ranking lost their status as crypto-billionaires. These are the three bankrupts mentioned above, as well as seven more people whose fortunes now range from $550 million to $800 million.
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AIn January 2022, Changpeng Zhao became the richest person on the planet among those whose work involves cryptocurrencies. The founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Binance is worth an estimated $96 billion, read more here.
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Joseph Lubin, one of the creators of Ethereum, came in second with between $1 billion and $5 billion. Changpeng Zhao, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance ($1.1–2 billion), came in third.
The authors of the ranking explain the indication of the approximate range of wealth of the listed millionaires by the fact that the cryptocurrency market is opaque and highly volatile.
"Our calculations are based on cryptocurrency holdings, after-tax profits from trading crypto-assets and their stakes in companies that are linked to cryptocurrencies... We're pretty sure we missed some people and some of our estimates are approximate," the publication notes.
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