Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, has now become a crypto billionaire.
Buterin’s public Ethereum (ETH) address, which he has previously confirmed to be his primary wallet (in 2018), is now holding a little over $1.05 billion in Ether. Buterin became a billionaire after the ETH price surged past the $3,000 mark today (May 3, 2021).
Buterin’s address holds approximately 333,500 ETH valued at just over a billion dollars, according to Etherscan data. Notably, Ethereum has been outperforming Bitcoin and most other major digital assets, with ETH price increasing around 4x (from about $700 at the beginning of this year).
Ethereum is trading at just over $3,150 at the time of writing. The crypto is up nearly 9% in the past 24 hours and claims a market cap of over $365 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Notably, Buterin has joined other crypto billionaires such as Sam Bankman-Fried who has a net worth of $8.7 billion and manages billions of assets through Alameda Research, the quantitative crypto platform he launched in 2017.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has a net worth of around $6.5 billion, blockchain pioneer Jed McCaleb has a net worth of about $2 billion, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao is worth nearly $2 billion as well, and Coinbase founder Fred Ehrsam has a fortune of $1.9 billion.
Digital Currency Group CEO Barry Silbert is also a crypto billionaire with a net worth estimated at around $1.6 billion. Bitcoin advocate Tim Draper is worth $1.5 billion and Robinhood founders Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev each have a net worth of $1 billion.
The increase in wealth by these prominent Fintech and crypto industry participants indicates that the digital assets and blockchain space is maturing at a rapid pace. Leading digital currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum could completely transform the financial system by enabling permissionless, borderless, and censorship-resistant value transfer.
While many argue that cryptocurrencies are not an effective medium-of-exchange, even more conservative Chinese officials have acknowledged that these assets are a form of investment. So far, Bitcoin and Ethereum have shown incredible potential to serve as an effective long-term investment as they’ve outperformed all other assets in the past decade.
(Note: These net worth estimates have been provided by Forbes’ 2021 World’s Billionaires list)