There are nearly 2700 billionaires worldwide in 2022. And some of them are richest people in crypto, having made fortune with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Recently Elon Musk bought $2.89 billion of Twitter stocks. And became the biggest Twitter shareholder.
This made him the richest person in the world with about $219 billion in assets. Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos is the second richest person with $171 billion.
Of course, Musk isn’t a crypto billionaire despite all the tough work he does promoting Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, and other tokens on Twitter.
But are there any crypto billionaires in the world? Actually, yes, there lots of them.
Here is the new Forbes list of the richest people in crypto and blockchain billionaires.
Jed McCaleb, 47 years, $2.5 billion
Being an American programmer, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, McCaleb founded the Stellar platform and was the Chief Technical Officer of Ripple until 2013.
He is also linked with the infamous Mt. Gox Bitcoin exchange, and the peer-to-peer eDonkey and Overnet networks.
In January 2018 Forbes placed him 40th on the list of the world’s richest people with nearly $20 billion net worth.
Now his total assets are evaluated at around $2.5 billion. I wonder, how has he spent that much money in just a couple of years.
Barry Silbert, 43 years, $3.2 billion
Silbert is the founder and CEO of Digital Currency Group (DCG), which is a conglomerate of five cryptocurrency-focused companies.
The biggest revenue generator of DSG is digital asset manager Grayscale, which holds precisely $28 billion in Bitcoin, Ether, and other digital assets.
DCG has invested in more than 200 crypto startups to date.
In 2015 Silbert sold his stock trading platform Second Market to Nasdaq. But the sum of this contract is still unknown.
Song Chi-Hyung, 38 years, $3.7 billion
This is the only South Korean crypto billionaire on our list.
Song Chi-Hyung has founded South Korea’s leading crypto exchange Upbit. He is also the chairman of Upbit’s parent company Dunamu.
Among the famous Dunamu shareholders were the agency behind K-pop musicians BTS (2.5% stake) and the U.S. semiconductor giant Qualcomm (6% stake).
Dunamu is valued at $17 billion now.
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, 40 years, $4 billion each
Known as Mark Zuckerberg’s deceived friends, these twins, and former Olympic rowers made quite an impressive entrepreneurship career.
Forbes says they began buying Bitcoin in 2012 and invested roughly $65 million in digital gold.
In 2014 they also founded Gemini exchange and later started their own digital art auction platform Nifty Gateway.
Last year Forbes estimated that each twin has a cryptocurrency holding of $1.4 billion. Seems like their assets have risen more than twice in value since then. No wonder they are in the list of the richest people in crypto.
Chris Larsen, 61 years, $4.3 billion
Having founded several Silicon Valley technology startups, Larsen launched Ripple Labs, Inc.
Today Ripple token XRP is in 8th place in the top cryptocurrencies list by market cap. The token is trading for around 80 cents.
In 2020 Larsen donated US$1 million to five San Francisco food banks for COVID-19 relief efforts, and his worth was estimated nearly at $59 billion.
Crypto businessman has also partnered with climate groups to launch a climate campaign for reducing Bitcoin’s heavy carbon footprint.
Gary Wang, 48 years, $5.9 billion
The co-founder and chief technology officer of FTX exchange holds a 16% stake in this company.
FTX also has its own native token FTT with around $6.3 billion of market capitalization.
Before entering the crypto world Wang was a software engineer at Google. Actually he was one of those guys who brought us the online booking platform Google Flights.
Brian Armstrong, 39 years, $6.6 billion
Coinbase founder received media attention for his policy of keeping the workplace free of political activism.
Something might have changed over years. Because recently Coinbase blocked 25 000 Russian crypto wallets because of the war that Russia started against Ukraine. That’s quite a political move, one must say.
A few months ago Armstrong bought the Bel-Air mansion in Los Angeles for $133 million, and it was one of the biggest transactions in the city ever.
Previously Armstrong has been advocating against the EU Parliament’s proposed crypto legislation.
Sam Bankman-Fried, 30 years, $24 billion
Definitely, the youngest crypto billionaire in our list. Bankman-Fried founded the FTX exchange and still is the CEO of the company.
Bankman-Fried is a vegan. He lives in the Bahamas, shares an apartment with roommates, and almost never drinks or goes on vacation.
In 2012 he entered the Californian Y Combinator startup accelerator and received a $150 000 investment. This money was brought to fund Coinbase.
Now he owns around half of FTX and more than $7 billion worth of the exchange’s token.
Changpeng Zhao, 44 years, $65 billion
The richest crypto billionaire founded one of the most popular crypto exchanges in the world.
Yes, that’s Binance.
Being was born in China. But his family migrated to Canada in the late 1980s. Newspapers love the stories about young Changpeng selling hamburgers at McDonald’s and working night shifts at a gas station to cover household expenses.
Forbes estimates that nowadays he owns at least 70% of Binance. And that’s the leading global platform for crypto trading.
It’s still unknown how many Binance’s native token BNB he owns. A lot of them, probably.
Sources: Forbes
