Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian reportedly bought 50,000 ether (ETH) for just $15,000 during a cryptocurrency presale in 2014 for just 30 cents per coin.
Ohanian, who left the social media giant in 2020, told Forbes on Feb. 21. article that he found the idea of a decentralized store of value very attractive, in part because of his Armenian background, which prompted him to bet early on Ethereum.
“Any group of people who have in their minds or in their collective history some idea of persecution, especially by the state, makes the idea of an accumulation of value not controlled by any one state very attractive. So, in a way, that was built into me back then and made me receptive to the idea of a decentralized currency.”
At current prices, this investment is worth a whopping $82.5 million. according to to CoinMarketCap, which means an increase of 549,589%.
He went on to explain how Turkish soldiers seized his family’s legacy of family carpets during the Armenian genocide in World War I, which led to his interest in “non-confiscable property.”
Because of his distaste for confiscated property, Ohanian is a strong advocate of self-custody and manages the private keys of some of his most valuable cryptocurrency-related investments to ensure they don’t end up on exchanges that are more vulnerable to prying government hands.
When he heard about Ethereum at a meeting with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, Ohanian said he sees the potential for developers to create a wide range of potentially non-fungible assets such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
As a result, he made his initial investment in Ether, but noted in an interview that “in hindsight, I didn’t invest nearly as much as I should have.”
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Ohanian founded venture capital firm 776 in 2020 using proceeds from his early investments in Ethereum and Coinbase, which invested in 29 cryptocurrency-related startups and raised $500 million in February 2022 to fund similar investments.
In keeping with Ohanian’s view that bear markets provide investors with an opportunity to buy assets at discounted prices, the firm sees the latest market downturn as the perfect time to bet long-term on the crypto industry.
The firm currently boasts over $750 million in assets under management.
Ohanian noted that while cryptocurrency is extremely volatile, “there are a lot of people who have generational consciousness seeing massive inflation,” which makes the volatility of cryptocurrency much more acceptable to these people.
Credit : cointelegraph.com
