Globally, the crypto industry has proven extremely lucrative for several individuals. Retail investors who entered the space at the right time made millions of dollars in months. Even the most significant returns pale in comparison to the wealth accumulated by individuals building cryptocurrency-related platforms and solutions. The platforms that performed well made their founders into some of the richest people in the world.
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Recently released Hurun India’s Rich List contains 17 billionaires from the crypto industry. Here’s a list of the top 10 names from the list:
Changpeng Zhao
The Chinese-Canadian businessman is the founder and CEO of Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world. Popularly known as CA in the crypto space, Zhao has an estimated net worth of $23 billion. Binance launched in 2017 and has been at the forefront of crypto trading ever since.
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Samuel Bankman-Fried (SBF)
SBF is an MIT graduate and the founder of crypto exchange FTX launched in 2019. Since its launch, FTX has seen massive growth and has reached a daily transaction volume of $10 billion with over 1 million users. SBF has an estimated net worth of $21 billion.
Brian Armstrong
Brian Armstrong is the CEO of popular crypto exchange Coinbase, His estimated net worth is $10 billion. Coinbase aims to facilitate on-ramp (buy crypto with fiat currency) and off-ramp (sell crypto to gain fiat currency) transactions free of cost, thus building an accessible financial system for all. Coinbase has a user base of over 89 million customers from more than 100 countries.
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Chris Larsen
Larsen is the executive chairman and former CEO of the popular cryptocurrency Ripple. He is also an angel investor and co-founder of several Silicon Valley startups. He has an estimated net worth of $6.7 billion. Ripple is known for its “real-time gross settlement system”, which is sought after by many banks all over the world.
Jed McCaleb
McCaleb is an entrepreneur, programmer and philanthropist with a current net worth of $3.8 billion. He founded Ripple, Stellar and Mt. Gox (which shut down later in 2014). Before he founded Stellar, he served as Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) until 2013. Currently, he is serving as the CTO at Stellar.
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Barry Silbert
Barry Silbert is the founder of the Digital Currency Group (DCG), a conglomerate of five organisations that are all crypto-focused. DCG’s revenue is mainly driven by Grayscale, the world’s largest bitcoin investor, which manages $28 billion worth of crypto assets. Barry’s current net worth is estimated at $4 billion.
Tyler & Cameron Winklevoss
The Winklevoss twins are well-known for suing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and founding Winklevoss Capital and crypto exchange Gemini. The brothers launched Gemini in 2015 as an exchange that simplifies crypto trading for beginners as well as veterans. The Winklevosses have an estimated net worth of over $4.2 billion each.
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Michael Saylor
Michael Saylor is the co-founder of MicroStrategy, business intelligence and mobile software solutions firm known for owning the largest Bitcoin reserve on earth. It is said that Saylor sparked Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s interest in cryptocurrencies back in 2020 over a Twitter conversation. He is an advocate of Bitcoin himself and is vocal on Twitter. His current net worth stands at $1.3 billion.
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Matthew Roszak
Roszak is the founder of Bloq, a blockchain platform that designs blockchain-based applications for other international businesses. Previously, he worked with SilkRoad Equity where he was charged for insider trading by the SEC, whom he settled it with later. His present net worth is $1.9 billion.
