Meet the crypto billionaires of 2022; full list here - BusinessToday Cryptocurrencies have had a wild year in 2021. Popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, etc. reached their all-time high in 2021. The global market cap reached great heights. Not just that, many people made fortunes out of this gold rush, seven people became billionaires via crypto, bringing the total number of crypto billionaires to 19 as per the Forbes Billionares list. Let us take a look at them individually. 19. Tim Draper, $1.2 billion ADVERTISING Tim Draper, based out of the United States, is a venture capitalist by profession. He started investing in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies from the year 2012. 18. Matthew Roszak, $1.4 billion Maththew Roszak is an early adopter of Bitcoin, who started investing since 2012 and also participated in initial coin offerings of altcoins like Mastercoin, Factom, etc. He has also invested in cryptoexchanges like Coinbase and Kraken. 17. Michael Saylor, $1.6 billion Originally a dot-com era billionaire, Saylor saw his riches sink during the dot-com meltdown and in the aftermath of an accounting controversy. Then Saylor found Bitcoin and now he has made his company a Bitcoin proxy, buying it at every dip. Moreover, he has also been taking loans to buy more Bitcoin. 16. Kim Hyoung-nyon, $1.9 billion Hyoung-nyon is the executive vice president of South Korea's Dunamu crypto exchange. He currently owns about 13 per cent stake in the exchange, which he cofounded ten years ago. 15. Fred Ehrsam, $2.1 billion Fred Ernest Ehrsam is an American businessman and investor. He is a co-founder and managing partner of Paradigm Capital, a cryptocurrency investing firm. Additionally, he co-founded Coinbase, a Bitcoin exchange. 13 and 14. Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah, $2.2 million OpenSea is a secondary NFT marketplace was cofounded by these two. In January, OpenSea received funding, valuing the company at $13.3 billion, up from $1.5 billion six months before. Finzer and Atallah own roughly 18.5 percent of the company between them. 11 and 12. Nikil Viswanathan and Joseph Lau, $2.4 billion Viswanathan and Lau are the co-founders of blockchain decacorn Alchemy, a toolbox for blockchain entrepreneurs and developers. Alchemy powers Web3 applications like OpenSea and decentralised exchange Kyber. The company raised $200 million in February at a $10.2 billion valuation, fewer than four months after raising $3.5 billion. 10. Jed McCaleb, $2.5 billion The majority of McCaleb's wealth was amassed through Ripple Labs and XRP, the payments-focused cryptocurrency project he co-founded in 2012. McCaleb quit the project in 2013 after arguing with Larsen and other team members. In accordance with the terms of a 2014 separation agreement with Ripple Labs, McCaleb has now sold a significant portion of his XRP in periodic increments. He founded Stellar and currently serves as its Chief Technology Officer. 9. Barry Silbert, $3.2 billion Silbert has developed a broad cryptocurrency business as the founder of Digital Currency Group. The company owns Grayscale, which manages $28 billion in crypto assets, as well as CoinDesk, a popular crypto news and events website. DCG has invested in over 200 crypto companies through its subsidiaries. Before Bitcoin, Silbert sold stock trading business Second Market to Nasdaq for an undisclosed price in 2015. 8. Song Chi-hyung, $3.7 billion Chi-hyung is the founder of Upbit, South Korea's largest cryptocurrency exchange. He has benefited from the country's $46 billion cryptocurrency business. He is thought to own around a quarter of Upbit's parent company, Dunamu, which was valued at $17 billion. 6 and 7. Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, $ 4 billion each Former rivals of Mark Zuckerberg, these twin brothers have amassed crypto fortunes worth around $4 billion each. Following the debut of Gemini, a cryptocurrency exchange, the brothers have continued to add to their digital asset portfolios. 5. Chris Larsen, $4.3 billion Larsen is the co-founder and executive chairman of blockchain company Ripple. XRP, which is the native token of the blockchain is currently the 8th largest cryptocurrency by market cap. 4. Gary Wang, $5.9 billion Wang,is the co-founder and chief technology officer of FTX crypto exchange. He owns 16.5 percent of FTX's global operations as well as more than $600 million in FTT, the exchange's native token. 3. Brian Armstrong, $6.6 billion Brian Armstrong is the founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, which he founded in 2012. He is an entrepreneur and investor. 2. Sam Bankman-Fried, $24 billion Bankman-Fried is the creator and CEO of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange. He also manages assets through Alameda Research, a quantitative bitcoin trading firm he launched in October 2017, which he co-founded with his brother. 1. Changpeng Zhao, $65 billion Zhao is the founder and CEO of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume. He used to once work at McDonalds flipping burgers but now, he is the richest crypto billionaire.
To be honest, I think all of this is wonderful. Of course it sucks for those losing money, and it sucks that the bear market is hitting hard, but the lessons here are epic. With all these exchanges, they wanted to make money so they lent out crypto. Well, it wasn't even theirs, so that's a problem. But do traditional banks do anything different? Of course they have fractional reserve banking, so they only need a little bit on their books to lend out a heck of a lot more. Now the customers wanted their crypto back, and they didn't have it. But lets ask ourselves, would regular banks be any better? Look at what's happening in China with their banks, and the status of the real estate ponzi scheme that is perhaps going to take down the whole system over there. The fact of the matter is whether its banking, or real estate, or crypto exchanges, all of them have counter party risk. The banks got rescued in 2008, but looks like nobody wants to rescue crypto exchanges. But can we really say they are any worse? Heck, even governments with their promises to backstop bank accounts have barely any assets in them. Its like less than 1% of all outstanding deposits. This is all a wonderful lesson for why the entire world needs a global reserve currency that you self custody. Customers don't trust banks. Many banks don't trust other banks. Heck, just doing a deep dive into the eurodollar from Jeff Snider videos, its clear that whole system is based on trust and very quickly getting protectionist. This entire system needs liquidity and its drying up. Thank god bitcoin allows us to self custody because the trust in banks, corporations, and governments is gone. And now of course we also add crypto exchanges to this as well.
It's not just the 2008 issue that we should be coming back to time and time again. Just before that America had the S&L crisis. The Savings & Loan disaster was a mess pretty much set in motion by Reagan who thought it would be wise to allow new rules that allowed THOSE types of bank/loan institutions to no longer be forced to keep their OWN money invested along with their depositor's money. They were now able to invest OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY in whatever risky shit they chose, without risk to themselves. Hence, even an idiot can see this was a financial disaster about to happen... And special props to Reagan who caused a government deficit balloon of epic proportions, which now the US is addicted to like crack and there is no way out. But that's another horror story for another time.
Exactly right. Imagine if we have the kind of event in fiat world that we just had in the crypto world. Sure the powers would make sure to stem the bleeding, but I kind of like how with crypto, it all worked like it should. (I've seen lots of twitter posts say exactly this as well, that the system worked). The poor suckers who had deposits didn't realize their coins were being lent out, but it doesn't mean crypto was broken. As Luna and others were forced to liquidate BTC, price kept dropping until there were enough buyers. Not a single entity was forced to print money, and hence the losses were not socialized, unlike what happens in traditional finance where we let hedge funds take all the profits, and when the system blows up, the government comes in to clean up the mess with taxpayer money, hence making us all chip in for the losses. To be honest, I'm excited for an implosion and I hope it happens. From what I'm learning, its the Eurodollar that is causing all the problems, and signals point to a lack of pristine collateral, and the FED essentially can't do anything since it has no control over this system. If anything, more treasuries need to be issued because there is a hunger for this type of asset as its the only thing anything wants these days. And lets not forget that most of all of this is rehypothecated many times. Not unlike the whole crypto collapse where your coins are god knows where.
If you don't see the difference you are blind. Banks only give credit for things that have a more or less stable value (houses, cars, computers, personal income from salaries...), so the risk is much smaller than crypto's that can lose 80% of their value in very short time (as crypto's have no real value). We never see banks giving billions of credit to just one party, they spread risk. What happened with crypto's was just the opposite, billions of credit to one party and values that lost 100% in just a few days. When I was treasury manager I once took for the company a 300 million Euro credit. First of all it was with a consortium of banks as no bank wanted to take the whole risk alone. And second the building that was build was the guarantee for the credit.So the bank could sell that building in case this went wrong. If things go wrong in a credit for crypto's, it means that the guarantee itself went to zero. So there is nothing left.
Most likely their virtual / digital accounts are worth billions of dollars. So they can retire happily but in hiding.
How much money do you think banks would be loaning out in this real estate bubble if they had to hold the mortgage on their books and couldn't sell it off to the government? It sure is easy to make a loan if you don't give a shit about getting your money back since you know someone is gonna take that loan off your hands.
But I think you're aiming your gun at the wrong people. The traditional banking sector is modeled over many decades of successes and failures that brought on rules and regulations to prevent total collapse and provide redress to customers and banks. As we know, the system is imperfect, but it doesn't mean we should do away with it by removing the only watchdog. The true culprits aren't the banks, but the financial sector influencing government into loosening rules to allow them room to build sophisticated products to squeeze handsome profits. Credit default swaps aren't banking instruments, they are financial instruments built by the same types of people who are building crypto up, young, smart, arrogant tech and finance savy individuals for whom rules are hindrance and what better to build a system with no government oversight.