While people from Ireland are starting to hold investment and earn profit from Bitcoin, you’ll be hard-pressed to find many, if any, Irishmen or Irishwomen who have as much of the popular cryptocurrency as these people. Here, we look at the richest bitcoin owners.
Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong has the most with an estimated net worth of $6.5 billion. He started the popular trading platform. He owns about 20 percent of Coinbase and told Forbes: “I wanted the world to have a global, open financial system that drove innovation and freedom.”
Next is Sam Bankman-Fried, who has a net worth of about $4.5 billion. He was an exchange-traded fund trader on Wall Street before launching FTX, which is a crypto derivatives exchange. The bulk of his riches sit in FTX’s equity and FTT tokens.
Chris Larsen is a successful entrepreneur and possesses a net worth of around $6.5 billion. He was central to the start of online lender Eloan in the late 1990s. Before the 2000s arrived, he had also started peer-to-peer lender platform Prosper. His highest-profile involvement in a start-up, though, has been with Ripple – the cryptocurrency that tries to role with big boys Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Meanwhile, a report by the respected Plum Assessment in 2021 revealed that people from Ireland are investing more in Bitcoin than those from England, Spain and other countries around Europe. Perhaps, sooner or later, we’ll see an Irishman or woman in this list of richest Bitcoin owners. The process is certainly made easier by Bitcoin ATMs popping up around Ireland.
In fourth position is Barry Silbert. The founder of Digital Currency Group has a net worth of $1.5 billion. Silbert has a hand in digital asset manager Grayscale, too, which generates approximately $590 million in revenue per year. That’s a hefty amount of money and comparable to and, if tripled over three years, the near equivalent of the record-high $1.586 billion won in the US Powerball in 2016. None of the biggest jackpots and lottery prizes in the world have been that big.
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss are former Olympic Games. For reasons vast and varied, they welcomed a legal settlement with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg in 2012 to the tune $65 million. They used a large portion of that to buy into Bitcoin in a big way. They own approximately 70,000 Bitcoins. Their collective net worth is around $1.4 billion.
Jed McCaleb was in partnership with Larsen, who was mentioned earlier in this list, and weighs in at sixth position. He was heavily involved in the launch of three cryptocurrency entities – Mt Gox, Ripple and most recently Stellar. His net worth is an estimated $1.3 billion. Interestingly, before he became a real big fish in the digital assets market, he created the file-sharing platform eDonkey2000.
Matthew Roszak concludes the list in seventh position with a net worth of about $1 billion. He worked as a venture capitalist before getting into cryptocurrency as a career. His entrepreneurial spirit shone through when he co-created a formal attempt to give each member of the United States congress $50 in digital currency. Some, but not all, accepted the offer.
