Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain platform, is the latest casualty in the dramatic collapse of crypto fortunes.
“I’m not a billionaire anymore,” Buterin, 28, wrote in a Twitter post.
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has been caught up the crypto meltdown.Credit:Bloomberg
Buterin created Ethereum in 2014 and is the owner of a digital wallet that as recently as November contained holdings worth about $US1.5 billion ($2.1 billion). Since then, the price of the Ether token that’s associated with the blockchain has fallen by 55 per cent.
Buterin has previously suggested he’d welcome lower prices of digital coins, telling Bloomberg News in February: “The people who are deep into crypto, and especially building things, a lot of them welcome a bear market.”
Crypto holdings have been pummeled by a steep drop in prices of digital currencies and the turmoil engulfing the algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD and its Luna token. Changpeng Zhao, founder of the crypto exchange Binance, has seen more than $US80 billion — or 84 per cent of his wealth — evaporate this year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He debuted on the wealth index in January with a net worth of $US96 billion, one of the world’s largest. It has shrunk to around $US15 billion.
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Some ultra-wealthy crypto backers have professed humility amid the upheaval. Michael Novogratz, founder of crypto merchant bank Galaxy, acknowledged that TerraUSD was “a big idea that failed.”
Novogratz, a former hedge fund trader, blamed the challenging global macro backdrop, and said the coin’s collapse dented confidence in the cryptocurrency and decentralised finance space. Novogratz said Galaxy Digital first invested in Terraform Labs in the fourth quarter of 2020. Novogratz described how the downward pressure on reserve assets and UST withdrawals triggered “a stress scenario akin to a ‘run on the bank.’”
“The reserves weren’t enough to prevent UST’s collapse,” Novogratz wrote. “With hindsight things always look clearer.”