In its index of cryptocurrency and blockchain billionaires, the business magazine Forbes has recorded seven new entries compared to the previous year. There are now 19 people in total who have become extremely wealthy with Bitcoin & Co. Newcomers include Nikil Viswanathan and Joseph Lau, founders of Web3 development platform Alchemy, both with an estimated net worth of $2.4 billion each. Also newcomers are Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah, who founded NFT trading platform Open Sea and are each worth around $2.2 billion, according to Forbes.
Stock market founders at the top
The top three spots in the Forbes crypto billionaires list are occupied by crypto exchange founders. At the top by a clear margin is Changpeng Zhao, founder and head of the world’s most important centralized crypto exchange Binance. His assets are estimated to be worth around $65 billion, which also makes him the only crypto mogul in the Forbes list of the top 20 wealthiest people in the world – 19th. Earlier this year, the business news agency had him Briefly seen ranked 11th in Bloomberg’s super-rich list .
Forbes’ second place crypto rich is Sam Bankman-Fried with around 24 billion US dollars; he is the head and founder of the FTX exchange. Third place goes to Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US, with a fortune of $6.6 billion.
The assets estimated by Forbes, at least for the crypto billionaires, are quite close to the values that Bloomberg also determined for its list of the super-rich . Tesla CEO Elon Musk currently tops both lists of the richest people in the world, with Forbes putting his fortune at $219 billion and Bloomberg at $276 billion.