Forbes has compiled the first ranking of cryptocurrency billionaires

Forbes magazine has compiled the first-ever list of the richest people who have made a fortune in cryptocurrency. It consists of 19 people with fortunes ranging from $350 million to $8 billion.

• Topping the list is Chris Larsen, co-founder of Ripple, a cryptocurrency payment platform, holding 5.2 billion tokens in his own currency. Now Ripple is the third largest cryptocurrency in the world in terms of capitalization after bitcoin and ethereum. In 2017, it grew 20 times faster than bitcoin - in a year, Ripple has risen in price by 416 times. Forbes estimated Larsen's fortune at $7.5-8 billion.
• In second place is Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and CEO of ConsenSys, a blockchain consultancy for giants like Microsoft. His fortune is $1-5 billion. Another co-founder of Ethereum, a native of Russia, Vitalik Buterin, is only in 16th place with a fortune of $400-500 million, but the youngest is 24 years old.
• Third place with $ 1.1-2 billion is taken by the Chinese Changpeng Zhao , the creator of the world's largest crypto exchange Binance with 6 million users. The crypto-exchange business is not easy - Binance has already had to relocate from country to country three times, escaping from regulatory bans.
• In the top five, only brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss made Bitcoin the basis of their wealth. The twins started investing in bitcoin in 2012, when almost no one else was doing it. The brothers invested in cryptocurrency, including money won in court from their former partner, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whom the Winklevosses accused of stealing the idea of ​​a social network. Now their fortune is $0.9-1.1 billion, the fourth place in the list.
• The median age of crypto billionaires is 42, 25 years younger than the median age of 67 on the Forbes 400 list.

What do I get from this?

It is useless to memorize the numbers of the fortune of cryptocurrency billionaires - it can grow or fall by half in a few days. But the age of the founders of crypto platforms is inspiring - at the age of 24 they rarely get into the Forbes list.

Marina Bocharova, The Bell