Despite its volatile nature, the world has recently found the crypto industry to be quite profitable. When they entered the market at the proper time, many investors made hundreds of thousands of dollars in a short period of time.
In Lehman's terms, a crypto billionaire is a person who has amassed millions of dollars through cryptocurrency investments or has built lucrative crypto-related enterprises into multimillion-dollar businesses.
So far it's, been a crazy couple of years in the crypto sphere, as you might imagine the road to becoming a crypto millionaire let alone a billionaire is frequently long and fraught with danger.
However, given the fact that volatility has two sides, billionaire crypto fortunes have swelled from this gold rush. According to the Forbes Billionaires list, seven people became crypto billionaires, raising the total number of crypto billionaires to 19, an increase of 58 percent. However, when the value of digital assets has fallen, seven of the wealthiest crypto entrepreneurs in the world have collectively lost $114 billion since November.
Without any further ado, meet the crypto billionaires of 2022 according to Forbes!
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Binance’s Changpeng Zhao
Net worth: $65 billion
Source of wealth: Binance
Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, was founded and is led by Zhao. He used to flip hamburgers at McDonald's, but today he is the richest crypto billionaire.
Changpeng Zhao is a Chinese-Canadian businessman who happens to be the founder of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange platform, Binance. According to Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Zhao is worth an estimated $96 billion, surpassing the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page. The scary bit is that this wealth does not consider his personal crypto holdings. Despite the recent declines in cryptocurrencies and the firm being banished from China, Binance has continued to soar, and so does Changpeng Zhao’s wealth.
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FTX CEO Sam-Bankman Fried
Net worth: $21 billion
Source of wealth: FTX
SBF, a graduate of MIT, created the cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2019. Since that time, FX has experienced relentless expansion, reaching a daily transaction volume of $10 billion among more than 1 million customers. SBF is credited with starting the handshake between sports and cryptocurrencies. His reported $21 billion net worth is enormous.
The founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX is Bankman-Fried. Additionally, he oversees assets through Alameda Research, a quantitative bitcoin trading company he and his brother created in October 2017.
Forbes estimates Bankman-wealth Fried's to be $21 billion, placing him among the wealthiest people to emerge from the crypto market boom.
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Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong
Net worth: $6.6 billion
Source of wealth: Coinbase
The CEO of bitcoin exchange Coinbase is American investor and business executive Brian Armstrong. His practice of prohibiting political involvement in the workplace attracted media attention. Armstrong, a former software programmer for Airbnb, and former currency trader Fred Ehrsam cofounded Coinbase in San Francisco in 2012.
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Gary Wang of FTX
Net worth: $5 billion
Source of wealth: FTX
FTX co-founder and chief technology officer Gary Wang, who has a net worth of $5.6 billion from his 16 percent share in the company, is a newcomer to the list of cryptocurrency billionaires. The crypto exchange was established in 2019 by Bankman-Fried and press-shy Wang, the cofounder and chief technical officer of FTX.
Wang owns more than $600 million worth of FTT, the FTX native token, and a 16 percent stake in the company's global operations. Wang worked as a software engineer at Google before entering the cryptocurrency industry, where he contributed to the creation of the online travel agency Google Flights. He attended MIT to study math and computer science.
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Ripple’s Chris Larsen
Net worth: $4.3 billion
Source of wealth: Ripple
Larsen is the former CEO and current executive chairman of the well-known crypto company Ripple. He is recognized for having co-founded multiple Silicon Valley start-ups and serving as an angel investor. He currently has a net worth of $6.7 billion. Many banks around the world are interested in Ripple's "real-time gross settlement mechanism," which is well-known for it.
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Gemini’s Cameron Winklevoss
Net worth: $4 billion
Source of wealth: Bitcoin
Despite being the co-founder of New York-based cryptocurrency exchange Gemini in 2014, Cameron’s wealth comes from mainly from bitcoin. Known for the legal battles with friend-turned-foe Mark Zuckerberg, Cameron and his brother started trading BTC as early as 2012.
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Gemini’s Tyler Winklevoss
Net worth: $4 billion
Source of wealth: Bitcoin
The identical twin of Cameron, Tyler Winklevoss has cofounded Gemini with his brother. Gemini allows users to buy, sell, and store digital assets. The New York crypto exchange process daily $83 million.The the 40-year-old Harvard educated twin were caught up last year in an NFT scandal as they launched =$1.2 billion Nifty Gateway platform which accused of altering its conditions of sale by art collector Amir Soleymani in October 2021. Nifty Gateway claims Soleymani owes them $650,000.
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Son Chi-Hyung of Upbit
Net worth: $3.7 billion
Source of wealth: Upbit
After only three months since its October 2017 start, Chi-cryptocurrency Hyung's exchange UpBit has grown to become the biggest in South Korea. At the end of 2017, the platform, owned by Son's Dunamu, handled nearly $4.7 billion in daily transactions in one of the most significant markets for cryptocurrencies. Tens of millions of dollars have also been invested in the exchange by Kakao, the most well-known messaging service in South Korea. Now that Song is the chairman of the board at Dunamu, he is planning to go global. Also, Upit has partnered with Bitrex another pioneer crypto exchange
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Barry Silbert of Digital Currency Group
Net worth: $3.2 billion
Source of wealth: Digital Currency Group
The CEO and creator of Digital Currency Group (DCG), a grouping of five businesses devoted to cryptocurrencies, is Barry Silbert. Grayscale, a digital asset management that is in charge of $28 billion worth of Bitcoin, Ether, and other assets, is the main source of revenue for DCG.
Before entering the world of cryptocurrencies, Silbert worked as an investment banker and businessman. In 2015, he sold the stock trading platform Second Market to Nasdaq for an unknown sum.
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Jed McCaleb of Ripple and Stellar
Net worth: $2.5 billion
Source of wealth: Ripple, Stellar
Programmer, businessman, and philanthropist Jed McCaleb is from the United States. Co-founding and serving as CTO for Stellar, he McCaleb founded Ripple and held that position as CTO up to the year 2013 before co-founding Stellar. McCaleb is also credited with founding the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange, the eDonkey and Overnet peer-to-peer networks, and the eDonkey2000 software. According to a January 2018 claim, McCaleb had Ripple tokens valued at $20 billion, which would have put him in the 40th position on Forbes' list of the world's richest people.
