Initially, when the concept of decentralization began so many people doubted it’s ability to make one as super rich as it has today. Many people who snobbed the first cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) are now regretting as it has become so expensive that one unit of it could finance the education of four children in a family.
A lot of people now sees the crypto space as the best investment platform that can bring almost 1000% on ROI within months. Some even argue that the crypto industry is more lucrative than real estate. Let’s begin the countdown.
Top 5 crypto billionaires in 2022
5. Fred Erhsam
Frederick “Fred” Ernest Ehrsam III, is an American business executive and investor who is the co-founder and managing partner of cryptocurrency investment firm Paradigm. He is also the co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.
Ehrsam was born on May 10, 1988 in Boston, growing up in Concord, Massachusetts. He played video games professionally in high school, and was an avid World of Warcraft player, which introduced him to the concept of in-game digital currencies.
In 2010, Ehrsam graduated with distinction from Duke University, earning a B.S. in computer science with a minor in economics. At Duke, he was a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.
After graduating from Duke, Ehrsam became a foreign exchange trader at investment bank Goldman Sachs in New York. He learned about Bitcoin from a Georgetown University professor’s paper, and began trading in his free time.
In 2012, Ehrsam and Brian Armstrong co-founded Coinbase in an apartment in San Francisco, as a way for cryptocurrency enthusiasts to trade bitcoins and other digital currencies. The two met on the Bitcoin subreddit forum. Ehrsam served as Coinbase’s first President. Ehrsam reportedly reached out to his alma mater Duke to invest in Coinbase’s 2015 Series C. He increased Duke’s initial investment a hundredfold. In January 2017, he announced he was leaving the company, but would remain on its board.[8] He also reportedly still owned 8.9% of Coinbase stock as of April 2021, and was assigned to the company’s audit committee before its April 2021 public offering.
Ehrsam was featured as one of the main protagonists in the 2020 novel “Kings of Crypto: One Startup’s Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street”.
In 2018, Ehrsam co-founded cryptocurrency investment firm Paradigm with former Sequoia Capital investor Matt Huang. They founded the company to invest in cryptocurrencies and the companies that focus on that market, and became the firm’s managing partners. As of October 2020, the company had made 28 investments in cryptocurrency related companies.
On November 15th, 2021, Paradigm closed the largest-ever cryptocurrency venture capital fund at the time. The fund raised a total of $2.5 billion to invest in nascent cryptocurrency and Web3 projects.
4. The Winklevos Twins
Identical twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss cofounded cryptocurrency exchange Gemini in 2014; today it processes about $200 million a day in trades. Cameron is Gemini’s president; Tyler is CEO.
The former Olympic rowers are best known for accusing Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their idea for a social network. They used some of their $65 million legal settlement with the Facebook CEO to start stockpiling Bitcoin.
The twins still own an estimated 70,000 Bitcoins, in addition to other digital assets.
3. Chris Larsen
Chris Larsen is a business executive and angel investor best known for co-founding several Silicon Valley technology startups, including one based on peer to peer lending.
Chris Larsen cofounded Ripple in 2012 to facilitate international payments for banks using blockchain technology. Ripple counts American Express and Santander among its 100-plus customers.
Larsen stepped down as Ripple CEO in December 2016 but remains executive chairman. Prior to Ripple, he cofounded online mortgage lender e-Loan in 1996 and Prosper, a peer-to-peer lender, in 2005.
In April 2019, Larsen and his foundation gave $25 million, largely in XRP, to San Francisco State University.
2. Brian Armstrong
Brian Armstrong is an American business executive and investor who is CEO of cryptocurrency platform Coinbase. He received media attention for his policy of keeping the workplace free of political activism.
Brian Armstrong is the chief executive of Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States.
A former Airbnb software engineer, Armstrong cofounded Coinbase in San Francisco in 2012 with former currency trader Fred Ehrsam. Coinbase went public in a direct offering on Nasdaq on April 14, 2021, briefly reaching a market capitalization of $100 billion.
Armstrong owns about 19% of Coinbase’s shares. Cofounder Fred Ehrsam left the company in 2017 but still owns 6% and serves on the board of directors; he’s also a billionaire.
1. Sam Bankman Fried
Samuel Bankman-Fried, also known by his initials SBF, is an American entrepreneur, billionaire, and investor. He is the founder and CEO of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange, and FTX.US, its U.S. affiliate. As of February 2022, the exchange averages $10 billion of daily trading volume and has over one million users.
Sam Bankman-Fried is one of the richest people in crypto, thanks to his FTX exchange and Alameda Research trading firm.
The son of two Stanford law professors, he studied physics at MIT but was drawn to “effective altruism,” the utilitarian-inflected notion of doing the most good possible. So he took a job trading ETFs at a quant firm, donating a chunk of his salary to charity, then jumped into crypto trading in late 2017, when he spied a lucrative arbitrage opportunity.
Bankman-Fried launched his own exchange, FTX, in 2019. Built “by traders, for traders,” it’s one of the leading exchanges for buying and selling crypto derivatives.
Investors valued FTX at $18 billion in 2021, helping make him one of the richest people under 30 in history. The exchange and its U.S. operations hit a combined $40 billion valuation in January 2022.
Most of his wealth, which he says he will eventually donate to charity based on a philosophy called “earning to give,” is tied up in ownership of about half of FTX and a share of its FTT tokens.
Tech vision, a YouTube channel has compiled a video of five most richest crypto billionaires in 2022.
Watch the video below to understand more 👇🏿
