Forbes published a rating of cryptocurrency billionaires

Forbes magazine published a rating of billionaires, which multiplied their capital due to virtual currency. Americans are in the lead on this list. On the first line is co-founder of the third most popular cryptocurrency Ripple, former CEO of Chris Larsen with a fortune of 7.5-8 billion dollars. The volume of Ripple's capitalization reaches $ 29 billion. In the monitoring, Forbes experts analyze Larsen's own cryptocurrency state with a 17% stake in Ripple.

Six years ago, Larsen took in the allies the founder of Stellar and MtGox platforms, Jed McCaleb, and decided to introduce the blockchain into international banking operations. Larsen released a Ripple token (XRP). This year began for this cryptocurrency with a record $ 3.75, and capitalization reached $ 141 billion. At the time of publication, XRP price is about $ 0.76, but Larsen still tops Forbes' first crypto rich list, accounting of the 20 wealthiest people in crypto.

Silver went to Joseph Lubin, the co-founder of the Ethereum, the general director of the blocking company ConsenSys, formerly the top manager of the investment bank Goldman Sachs. His fortune totals from 1 to 5 billion dollars. The American believes that the blockchain can build a transparent financial world. Developing the infrastructure for this technology, Lubin actively invested in Ethereum in early 2014. Today, the American is CEO of ConsenSys, which provides consulting and audit services, security services and launches tokens.

The state of his partner, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, is estimated at $ 400-500 million.

On the third line of the rating of crypto-billionaires is the general director of the Binance Exchange, former technical director and co-founder of OkCoin CZ (born Changpeng Zhao). His fortune is 1.1-2 billion dollars.

Binance appeared in 2017 and quickly became the leader among stock exchanges in terms of trading volume per day. The platform has proven itself in the world digital money market, since every second it processes 1.4 million transactions from 6 million visitors. Users, trading 120 different coins on Binance, in recent months has secured a profit of $ 200 million.

The world's first businesspersons, who earned more than a billion dollars on Bitcoins - are Winklewoss brothers - took the fourth line of the rating from $ 0.9-1.1 billion. They have about 100,000 Bitcoins. In 2013, brothers invested 11 million dollars in digital money. That time Bitcoin could be bought for 120 dollars. Their capital before investing in Bitcoin, they earned on stock speculations. In addition, businesspersons sued Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, $ 65 million for violating copyrights when creating a social network.

For the basis of the study, Forbes experts took known materials about cryptocurrency reserves, after-tax profits and the cost of cryptocurrency companies. The rating took into account the opacity of operations with digital assets and the volatility of the market. In addition, the authors of the monitoring took into account the insecurity from the theft of tokens and the possibility of hacking the crypto exchange.

The cryptocurrency market is young and variable, so researchers took indicators in the range. Data are shown on January 19 this year.

Editor-in-Chief of Forbes USA Randall Lane:

"We are almost certain that we have missed some people and that some of our assessments may be far from the truth. However, so it was in 1982, when we first published a rating of 400 richest Americans. Then many told us that this cannot or should not be published. However, we did it, because we were firmly convinced that, by shedding light on the wealth invisible to the world, we would make the world a better place. The current report has the same goal. States of this magnitude should not hide in the shadows. "

The full list of crypto-oligarchs is available here in FORBES. The Forbes study does not mention such famous people as the founder of Bitmain Jihan Wu, the investor Roger Ver (in 2015 he owned approximately 300,000 BTC), as well as the CEO of Bitfinex and Tether - Jean-Louis van Der Velde and other major figures in the industry . The size of their states in cryptocurrencies is unknown to date, but if they are disclosed, they can put them on the first lines in the rating.