ווי אַלעקסיס אָהאַניאַן ווענדן $ 15K אין $ 82 מיליאָן מיט עטהערעום

Alexis Ohanian – Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Reddit – revealed he is an early Ethereum investor and purchased 50,000 ETH during the asset’s presale in 2014.

His stash is currently worth nearly $82 million.

Decentralization Drove his Investment Decision

The 39-year-old entrepreneur and investor of Armenian heritage said his ancestors’ tragic history is among the main reasons he is fond of the cryptocurrency industry.

אין אַ פריש אינטערוויו for Forbes, he said some of his great-grandparents were decapitated by Turkish soldiers during the Armenian genocide in 1915. The Ottomans also confiscated his family’s heirloom rugs and other personal belongings. 

As such, Ohanian has become a huge supporter of assets that centralized institutions can not seize:

“Any group of people who have in their consciousness, or in their collective history, some idea of persecution, especially by a state, makes the idea of a store of value that is not controlled by any single state very attractive. And so, in some ways, it was hardwired in me then and made me, in a way, receptive to the idea of a decentralized currency.”

Ohanian understood that a blockchain protocol called Ethereum was about to be launched almost a decade ago and invested $15,000 in its native token – ETH. This means he bought the cryptocurrency for roughly $0.30 per token.

His investment is now worth approximately $82 million, a staggering 546,000% return. However, Ohanian wished he could have bought more at the time:

“In hindsight, I didn’t invest nearly as much as I should have.”

He דיסקלאָוזד in 2021 that he has “a lot” of Ethereum without providing further details. 

His Other Crypto Forays

Apart from co-creating Reddit, Ohanian has founded another entity – the venture capital firm Seven Seven Six. It אויפשטיין $500 million at the beginning of 2022 to invest in cryptocurrency start-ups and דאַבאַלד אַראָפּ with another $177 million fundraiser several months later. 

Ohanian is also a proponent of non-fungible tokens. He געקויפט an NFT from the באָרד אַפּע יאַכט קלוב (BAYC) זאַמלונג last summer and gifted it to his wife – the tennis superstar Serena Williams.