China’s billionaires: examining the biggest portfolios from Vitalik Buterin to Satoshi Nakamoto

Bitcoin and blockchain have changed the way we look at money. This technology has also created a whole new way of intruding into people’s financial lives. Now, instead of searching through US Securities and Exchange Commission filings or Forbes magazine listings, you can check the portfolio of billionaires in person or online.

To Report Blockworks, although there are many billions of digital currencies, most of them are anonymous and only known by their wallet address on the blockchain network. However, a few giants of the industry have revealed their unretouched portfolios for all to see.

Vitalik Buterin; Founder of Ethereum

Vitalik Buterin was named the world’s youngest cryptocurrency billionaire by Forbes in 2021 (1400), when Ethereum first crossed $3,000. Although such data cannot confirm the name of the “youngest cryptocurrency billionaire”, the published figures of his inventory seem to confirm it.

According to Arkham Intelligence, the digital currency wallet attributed to Butrin was worth about $2 billion in May 2021 (May 1400). It is not far-fetched that Ethereum accounts for about half of these assets. Buterin’s holdings were worth much more than that, amid investor enthusiasm for Dogecoin-inspired memecoins.

Lucky fans and publishers of these memecoins saw Butrin’s Ethereum addresses flooded with large amounts of these non-cashable tokens. This is a form of guerrilla marketing aimed at tricking such observers into believing that Buterin is interested in these worthless memecoins.

As a result, on May 12, 2021 (May 22, 1400), Buterin’s cryptocurrency portfolio was worth more than $20.5 billion, placing him alongside the likes of Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio and Google’s Eric Schmidt. would put

Shiba Ino accounted for about $17.8 billion, equivalent to 87% of Buterin’s assets, although he also held holdings in other memecoins, including AKITA and HUSKY. Following the inevitable fall in the price of Shiba, Butrin’s holdings were significantly reduced in value, and he donated whatever was left to India’s Covid Relief Fund.

Currently, Butrin holds about $484 million in digital currency in addresses attributed to it, almost all of which is Ethereum. Arkham Intelligence’s report shows that Buterin has transferred $74 million worth of digital currency to exchanges including Kraken and Coinbase over the years.

Jed McCaleb; Co-founders of Ripple

All of Jed McCaleb’s billions of digital currency have been sold over the course of nearly a decade.

Until last year, Ripple Labs sent a constant stream of Ripple to known addresses “taco stand” McCaleb would send and he would subsequently sell those tokens on public markets.

Ripple was initially concerned about how quickly McCaleb was looking to sell his founding bonus, which totaled 9 billion Ripples worth $54 million at settlement (about $4.2 billion today).

The agreement had strict rules on how much Ripple McCaleb could receive over the course of a year, starting at $10,000 per week in 2015 and rising to 2 billion Ripple ($844 million) annually after 2020.

After taking the last receipt in mid-2022, McCalbe’s Taco Stand Ripple address is now zero.

Whale Alert estimated that McCaleb sold about 5.7 billion Ripples over the course of 8 years, worth $3.1 billion. The company found that McCaleb sold his Ripples at an average price of $0.55 per token, about 19% higher than the cryptocurrency’s current price.

Forbes now estimates the value of McCaleb’s assets, one of the founders of Ripple and co-founder of Ripple’s rival Stellar, at $2.4 billion.

Justin Sun; The founder of Tron

The value of Sun’s assets in September 2021 (September 1400), at its peak, was $6.3 billion.

This figure would put Justin Sun among the world’s 500 richest billionaires, along with Lululemon founder Chip Wilson and Viking Global’s Andreas Halvorsen.

The Sun has a reputation for decadence, and a review of his portfolio at peak value confirms this view.

Around 95% of his portfolio was locked in Avi and Kero lending protocols for profit when the cryptocurrency market cap was nearing its peak; including $2.63 billion USD Coin, 478,250 Rapid Ethereum worth $1.86 billion and 11,000 Bitcoin worth $545 million.

Today, the wallet address attributed to Sun is worth $858 million. The bulk of these assets are 303,660 Lido Staked Ethereum (STETH) worth $580 million and $160 million USDD, a stablecoin affiliated with Tron. He also has 23,724 Ethereum worth $46.76 million and 6,802 Makers worth about $4.97 million.

Sun is an active trader. The data shows that over the past years, he has sent 22.6 billion dollars of digital currency to various exchanges, more than half of which belongs to Binance.

Satoshi Nakamoto, other unknown billionaires

It is estimated that Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous and mysterious creator of Bitcoin, mined between 600,000 (about $6.75 billion) and 1.1 million Bitcoins (about $30.7 billion) in the early years of this digital currency. It then spreads all of these bitcoins across hundreds of addresses, making it somewhat difficult to track those funds directly.

If this estimate is correct, Nakamoto would rank among the world’s top 50 billionaires, just below Alain Wertheimer, the head of Chanel.

The famous address of “1Feex” is another prominent Chinese billionaire. This address has housed nearly 80,000 bitcoins worth $2.25 billion since March 2011, when it was controlled by Ross Ulbricht’s Silk Road online black market.

Someone connected to the Silk Road hack is believed to have access to Onefix’s address, though claiming ownership of the bitcoins could put police on the case again.

However, this did not stop Craig Wright, the self-proclaimed creator of Bitcoin, from claiming (unsuccessfully) in one of his lawsuits last year that he owns the funds.

Another number of Bitcoin addresses that are not associated with digital currency exchanges and other organizations, and whose inventory value reaches at least one billion dollars, is less than a couple of jins. According Atlasscan data It is also strange that there are currently no non-organizational Ethereum addresses containing a billion ether or more.

CEO of Coinbase and other off-chain billionaires

Cryptocurrency billionaires who store the majority of their wealth off-chain (outside the network and other than digital currency) also deserve attention.

Arkham Intelligence data shows that Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong currently holds about $590,000 in known addresses, almost all of which is Ethereum.

At its peak in early February, Armstrong’s portfolio was worth $1.23 million, virtually all of which consisted of the dydx token, the native token of a decentralized exchange of the same name. Forbes has announced Armstrong’s net worth at $2.5 billion.

Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and an active supporter of digital currencies, has about $4 million worth of digital currency, of which USDCoin accounts for more than half, and LidoSticked Ethereum and RapidEthereum are also part of it.

The value of Kuban’s digital asset portfolio reached $7.16 million last August, 86% of which was USD coins locked in the Avi protocol.

Ethereum, IpCoin, Ethereum Half-Service and Ribble are the tokens that make up the rest of his assets. Forbes estimates Cuban’s net worth at $5.1 billion.

There are certainly billions more in this space, such as Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, who do not have accurate and verified information about their affiliate addresses, and some well-known names active in this space may have unknown assets that no one knows about. .