The Forbes 400 list of America’s Richest People has six new members who have made their fortunes with cryptocurrencies.
The six are collectively worth $ 55.1 billion, according to Forbes. It also marks a total of seven billionaires from the crypto world for the first time to enter the Forbes 400 list. The list includes new names, including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Gemini owner Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam. The Forbes 400 list also includes Jed McCaleb, co-founder of Ripple, and Sam BankmanFried, CEO of FTX.
The six newcomers join Chris Larsen who was on the list last year. According to Forbes, the rise of crypto billionaires is mainly due to the growing interest in cryptocurrencies. More names are expected to join startups like Ripple, Kraken, Circle, BlockFi, and eToro are expected to go public soon.
Larsen
He is a business executive and angel investor known for co-founding several technology startups in Silicon Valley, including one based on peer-to-peer lending. Consumer FICO Credit Scores. In 2000, ELoan’s market value was estimated at $ 1 billion. In 2005, Larsen left the company when it was sold to Banco Popular. In 2006, he co-founded Prosper Marketplace and was CEO until 2012.
In 2012, he co-founded Ripple Labs, Inc., which developed Ripple and its native XRP token. Ripple is software that allows instant and direct money transfer between Ripple’s American Express account and Santander among its more than 100 customers.
Larsen resigned as CEO of Ripple in December 2016, but remains executive chairman.He owns over 3 billion XRP tokens and a 17% stake in Ripple Labs. XRP is currently trading at $ 1.07 at the time of writing.
Brian Armstrong – $6.5 billion
Brian Armstrong is the CEO of Coinbase Global, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States and the only cryptocurrency exchange to be listed on the NASDAQ exchange. He was previously an AirBnB software engineer. He was born on January 25, 1983, near San Jose, California.
He attended Rice University in Texas and received a dual bachelor’s degree in commerce and computer science in 2005, followed by a master’s degree in computer science in 2006. Armstrong co-founded Coinbase in San Francisco in 2012 with former forex trader Fred Ehrsam.
It has a roughly 19% stake in Coinbase, and when the company went public on NASDAQ, its market capitalization briefly hit $ 100 billion. Its wealth comes mainly from its Coinbase capital. as of this writing. Armstrong is ranked # 404 on Forbes’ Billionaire List.
Sam Bankman-Fried – $8.7 billion
Sam BankmanFried is the founder and CEO of the FTX crypto exchange, managing $ 2.5 billion in digital assets through Alameda Research, a quantitative cryptocurrency trading company he founded in October 2017 and based in Stanford, California from 2010-2014.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology was born. In 2014 he completed his studies in physics. He began his career at Jane Street Capital, a proprietary corporate firm. Later, in October 2017, he founded Alameda Research, a quantitative trading company. In April 2019, he founded FTX, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange that will own around 90% of Alameda Research as of 2021.
Sam BankmanFried made headlines when he was listed on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Finance list in 2021 and also made headlines in 2020 with his $ 5 million donations to a super PAC that backed Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and made him one of the president’s biggest donors.
The vast majority of his assets are in the capital of FTX and the FTX exchange’s native FTT token, which is currently trading at $ 62.52 at the time of writing. He’s number 274 on Forbes’ list of billionaires.
