List of Crypto Tycoons and How they Became So Rich

Kadhir Velavan Ramasubramanian
5 min readJun 30, 2018

Crypto Tycoons List Released by Statista

There has been a statistics released by a company called Statista that lists the Top 10 Crypto Tycoons. The list contains some prominent people in Crypto Space who are early adopters and used this tech to grow wealth. We will be analyzing each one of them and how they became a Crypto Tycoons.

Chris Larsen — Co-founder of Ripple

Chris Larsen is the co-founded the Ripple Labs, software that enables instant transfer between two parties(many banks and financial institutions). Ripple Labs also started its cryptocurrency called XRP. XRP is currently ranked third in marketcap after only Bitcoin and Ethereum. XRP is a token used for transferring assets like gold, money, miles, and rupees between two parties. Ripple’s XRP was created as a token for banks and financial institutions for transferring funds between two banks instantly across the globe instantly with minimal fees.

Ripple Labs is holding around 50 Billion XRP tokens and in that Chris Larsen is said to hold 15.8 Billion XRP. When the price of 1 XRP token hit ATH of $3.84, his value rose to $59.9 Billion dollars. He is undoubtedly the richest crypto tycoon and with more banks adopting Ripple and Price of XRP growing higher his net worth is set to go exponentially.

Joseph Lubin — Co-founder of Ethereum

Joseph Lubin is the co-founder of Ethereum along with Vitalik Buterin and Anthony Di Iorio. Lubin came to know about Ethereum in 2013 after he saw the whitepaper presentation from Vitalik. He also owns the majority of his stake in a company called ConsenSys, and he built this company by funding it with Bitcoins.

Lubin became a Crypto tycoon by investing in Ethereum early during its Initial Coin offering time. He is said to have bought a lot of Ether during crowd sale and is said to be the top buyer of ETH. Since the price of Ethereum sky-rocketed his value also rose to the skies. He would be only second to Chris Larsen in the list of richest crypto tycoons.

Changpeng Zhao — Binance Exchange Owner

Changpeng Zhao is the founder of the World’s largest exchange — Binance. It just started a year ago, and then there is not looking back, it serves more than 7 million customers with a volume of close to 2 million transactions per day. The exchange has a very strict policy for any coin to get listed. The price of any coin skyrockets after it gets listed in this exchange. Also, there are unconfirmed reports that the exchange is charging close to $ 1 Million in crypto for getting listed. Undoubtedly Chnagpeng Zhao would become the richest person on earth during the next bull run due to the massive trading volume happening in Binanace. Also of exchange revenue, they also have their own token Binance coin(BNB) used for trading in their exchange. The token’s value is also skyrocketing and would see exponential growth in the coming months.

Winklevoss Brothers — Early Bitcoin Adopters

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss brothers are early Bitcoin adopters and also own an exchange called Gemini in the US. They accused Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their idea about starting social media website that happened to be Facebook. In the legal battle with Mark, Winklevoss brothers happened to get compensation for about $11 Million. They invested the entire amount into Bitcoin four years ago. Now they are own the largest portfolio in Bitcoin, and their $11 million has fetched them more than Billion now due to the price of Bitcoin skyrocketing. Winklevoss brothers believe that Bitcoin is still in infancy and will grow 30-fold in the coming months.

Mathew Mellon — Late Billionaire

Mathew Mellon is no more and when he died his massive funds in Ripple’s XRP was also lost forever. He was so secure about the crypto funds that he didn’t share the private keys with anyone, even his family. When he died, half a billion USD of XRP tokens were lost forever.

Brian Armstrong — CEO of Coinbase

Brian Armstrong is the Co-founder and CEO of America’s biggest exchange — Coinbase. Coinbase has grown exponentially in the recent past and has become the biggest exchange in volume and users in the US. They also have crypto-crypto exchange called GDAX, while Coinbase is used for bringing in liquidity by allowing users to buy coins directly from fiat using the bank account. Coinbase is responsible for introducing crypto to America and helped it for adoption. Coinbase company is valued at $1.6 Billion, and Armstrong has a major stake in it making him be included in the crypto tycoons list.

Matthew Roszak — First ICO investor

Mathew Roszak is the co-founder of Bloq, and his net worth is said to be close to $1 Billion. He participated in initial coin offering even before the term was publicly used. He invested heavily in Mastercoin, Factom, and Maidsafe. He also invested in a couple of crypto startups in those times like Coinbase, Kraken, and BTCC. His Smart Crypto investments have earned him the place in the list of Crypto tycoons.

Anthony Di Iorio — Founder of Jaxx and Decentral

Anthony Di Iorio is the Co-founder of Ethereum and also the founder of Jaxx and Decentral. He is an early adopter of Bitcoin at a very early stage. He met Vitalik at a Bitcoin Meetup group and at his first meeting with him itself he was impressed with Vitalik’s brilliance. He funded Ethereum’s development at an early stage by investing funds from his prior company. His strategy is always to invest in a growing technology like Ethereum and pour that gains into another small coin that has great potential. He is said to be a billionaire and is sure to take place in the list of Crypto tycoons.

Brock Pierce — Co-Founder of EOS

In 2013 Brock Pierce founded the venture capital firm Blockchain Capital. Pierce announced $50 million Initial Coin offering launch in 2017, and the token was named as EOS. EOS raised $4 Billion in its ICO stage and became one of the most successful ones. Block.one is the company owned by Pierce that is responsible for marketing EOS. EOS is similar to Ethereum where businesses and programs are said to run blockchain to create decentralized applications. According to Forbes, his net worth would be between 700 million and 1.1 billion in crypto.

Michael Novogratz — CEO and Founder of Galaxy Digital

Michael Novogratz is like a crypto celebrity since he appears in the shows quite often promoting crypto and also he is hailed for accurately predicting a few years ago about the BTC price reaching 10k in December 2017. He is also an early adopter of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and his company Galaxy digital has recently started Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto index for providing institutional grade benchmark for cryptocurrency market. Bloomberg index tracks the largest and the most liquid portion of the cryptocurrency market. He is from wall street and would be a role model for many other wall street traders from moving away from traditional to cryptocurrency investment.

The above list is only Top 10; many others have made a huge fortune in crypto space. There is always a chance for others also to become one by adopting the right investment strategy and consistently learning to make the right move.

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