Back in April 2022, Forbes published a list of the richest crypto and blockchain billionaires in the world but soon after, the crypto market has been slammed with a series of historic crashes such as the collapse of LUNA-UST (May 2022), Three Arrows Capital – Voyager – Celsius (June, July, Augút 2022), and FTX (November 2022). Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies have also faced many difficulties.
Forbes’s list of crypto billionaires, therefore, has many changes along with the plunge of the market. According to recent estimates by Forbes, crypto billionaires lost $116 billion in 2022. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao suffered the most as his assets fell from $65 billion to only $4.5 billion. Coinbase CEO Brian Amstrong has an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion, down from $6 billion in March. Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen’s net worth fell from $4.3 billion to $2.1 billion; meanwhile, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss of Gemini were valued at $4 billion in March but are now worth $1.1 billion each. FTX co-founders Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang, whose assets in March were valued at $24 billion and $5.9 billion, respectively, and at $0 in December. According to Forbes, the $3.2 billion fortune of Barry Silbert, was also lost due to the crash of FTX.
Since Sam Bankman-Fried has lost his billionaire status, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has climbed to second place on the Forbes rankings.However, 2022 is not a very successful year of Coinbase when it had to cut up to 18% of its staff and COIN stock price hit an all-time low in early this week, down 87% in a year.
Bitcoin investor Michael Saylor also lost his billionaire status as his fortune fell from $1.6 billion to $640 million. 2022 was an unsuccessful year for Saylor and his company when Bitcoin continuously plunged, MicroStrategy recorded a loss of $1.7 billion. Saylor then had to step down as MicroStrategy CEO. Other crypto billionaires, who own large companies such as Coinbase, Ripple, Gemini, OpenSea, Alchemy, etc., have also seen their assets decrease by 2 to 6 times in value in 2022.
However, Forbes’s report has been criticized by the crypto community for not publishing how to estimate assets, leading to the risk of miscalculating the assets of Changpeng Zhao, Barry Silbert. In addition, Forbes only included in its list the Western giants but ignores the Eastern giants like Justin Sun or founders of big crypto exchanges like OKX, Bybit, etc.
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