Good Day to All Readers,
Today I am going to give you information about Chris Larsen, the co-founder and executive chairman of the blockchain company Ripple, saw his net worth soar to $59.9 billion (on paper) on Thursday, according to a report from CNBC. This made him—theoretically—one of the five richest people in America, worth more than Google founders Larry Page ($50.7 billion) and Sergey Brin ($49.3 billion).
A cryptocurrency mogul is now one of the richest people in the world — at least on paper.
How did Larsen suddenly leapfrog some of the wealthiest people in the tech industry? The answer lies in the rapid rise of Ripple’s cryptocurrency XRP, the fast-growing cryptoasset of 2017.
Chris Larsen, the cofounder, executive chairman, and former CEO of the cryptocurrency company Ripple, became the world’s fifth wealthiest person
Larsen personally holds 5.19 billion XRP crypto coins as well as a 17% stake in the company he cofounded, Forbes reported Tuesday, citing sources close to Ripple. Fortune has since confirmed the figures with people close to Ripple.
Ownership of XRP is much more concentrated than it is for other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which were built explicitly on the idea of decentralization.
Analysts estimate that Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous inventor of Bitcoin, has the largest cache of the currency with 980,000 coins – or around 4.7 percent of all Bitcoin. His share would be worth $14.7 billion at current prices.
Yet, Larsen’s wealth is in a precarious position. Cashing out on his stash could spur a dramatic downturn in XRP’s price, since he owns such a large portion of it. Plus, his net worth is rather unstable compared to Brin’s or Page’s, because XRP and other cryptocurrencies are given to mercurial changes in price.
In fact, XRP’s price dropped dramatically as this post was being written—down as far as a dollar from its high on the exchange Kraken—before it started quickly climbing again.
Larsen, who cofounded Ripple in 2012 before stepping down as CEO in 2016, has amassed a stunningly large fortune, on paper, despite the youth of his moonshot venture. The company has set its sights on an starry-eyed goal: supplanting the SWIFT interbank money transmission service and angling for XRP to become a global reserve currency held by major financial firms in order to facilitate foreign exchange markets.
Astute readers will note that Larsen’s near $60-billion in digital funds are, for the most part, illiquid. And even if Larsen could easily convert the vast majority of his XRP coins into a traditional currency, like U.S. dollars, the influx of so many tokens into the market provoked by such a sell-off would no doubt greatly depress the value.
Bitcoin is the big daddy of cryptocurrencies, but Ripple is hot on its heels and has just made one of its co-founders very rich indeed
