Thanks to bitcoin’s rapid growth over the last decade, there are more billionaires than ever before. In this article we’ll cover some of the wealthiest Bitcoin holders in the world.
5. Michael Saylor
“GigaChad” Michael Saylor hasn’t been involved in the Bitcoin scene for long but his arrival marked a huge milestone for the cryptocurrency. MicroStrategy was the first publicly traded company to buy Bitcoin and put it on their balance sheet, purchasing $1.1 billion worth of BTC in December 2020. Despite bitcoin’s volatility, MicroStrategy is still sitting on a profit and will probably never sell. Saylor and entities under his control own roughly 110,000 bitcoin! Saylor is in a unique position as CEO because he controls 70% of the company’s shares. His net worth is estimated to be a whopping $1.9 billion.
4. Chris Larsen
Chris Larsen co-founded Ripple in 2012, a business that was supposed to make international payments easier by leveraging blockchain technology and the token called XRP. Everything went well and in January 2018 XRP spiked above $3 which made Larsen a fortune on paper! Unfortunately the gains didn’t last long as the crypto market crashed in the same year. Luckily Larsen didn’t put all his money on XRP and invested in other cryptocurrencies as well, one of them being bitcoin. That earned him a place among the bitcoin billionaires with his current net worth around $3.3 billion.
3. Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss
Olympic rowers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss are better known outside the sports world. What really made them famous was the Social Network – a biographical movie about the founding of Facebook. The twins sued Zuckerberg for stealing their idea and later settled for $65 million. They used a huge chunk of this money wisely and invested early into Bitcoin before the crowd. Later they co-founded Gemini – a cryptocurrency exchange similar to Coinbase. The twins were the first celebrities to openly share they bought bitcoin and now own an estimated 70,000 BTC. Their combined net worth is $3.2 billion.
2. Sam Bankman-Fried
At just 28 years old, Sam Bankman-Fried is not just a successful entrepreneur but also a billionaire with a net worth of $10 billion. The founder of quant trading firm Alameda Research, FTX and Defi protocol Serum is looking to build a fortune. Alameda Research is one of the biggest companies in the crypto space with around $2.5 billion in assets under management and responsible for 10% of the market’s cryptocurrency. To make sure he never misses a trade, Sam spends 24 hours in his office in Hong Kong with a bean bag to sleep on.
1. Brian Armstrong
Everyone that’s interested in bitcoin knows about Coinbase and they are the most valuable crypto exchange in the US and process about $3 billion every day. Their CEO Brian Armstrong owns 20% of the company and is the number one bitcoin billionaire in the world. When he first discovered bitcoin in 2010, Armstrong realized there weren’t many startups so he decided to make his own, giving birth to Coinbase two years later. Thanks to Coinbase’s IPO earlier this year, Brian Armstrong’s net worth is a cool $16 billion.
