Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of the social media website Reddit, reportedly paid just $15,000 for 50,000 Ether in 2014’s presale, or just 30 cents per coin.Ohanian, who left the social media behemoth in 2020, claimed in an interview with Forbes on February 21 that his interest in Ethereum’s decentralized value store was sparked in part by his Armenian ancestry.
“The concept of a store of value that is not controlled by any one state is enormously enticing to any group of people who have some thought of persecution in their consciousness or in their collective past, especially by a state. As a result, it was kind of hardwired into me at the time and made me open to the concept of a decentralized currency.
According to CoinMarketCap, this investment is now worth a staggering $82.5 million at current rates, a growth of 549,589%.
He went on to explain how his interest in “unseizable property” came about as a result of Turkish soldiers taking his family’s legacy of antique rugs during the Armenian genocide in World War I.
Ohanian is a strong supporter of self-custody due to his dislike of seized property. Some of his most significant investments in the cryptosphere are protected by private keys that he administers, keeping them off exchanges that are more open to government snooping.
In a discussion with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, Ohanian claimed he first learned about Ethereum and immediately saw the potential for developers to create a variety of possibly unseizable assets on top of it, such as nonfungible tokens (NFTs).
He so made his initial Ether investment, but later admitted in an interview that “in hindsight, I didn’t invest nearly as much as I should have.”
With the money from his initial investments in Coinbase and Ether, Ohanian established the venture capital firm 776 in 2020. The company received $500 million in February 2022 to fund additional investments after investing in 29 firms with a focus on cryptocurrencies.
The company has considered the most recent market slump as the ideal time to place long-term bets on the cryptocurrency business, in keeping with Ohanian’s beliefs that bear markets allow investors to buy assets at discounted rates.
The company presently manages over 750 million dollars in assets.Despite the fact that cryptocurrencies are incredibly unpredictable, according to Ohanian, “there are plenty of individuals who have that generational consciousness of seeing tremendous inflation,” making the volatility of cryptocurrencies much more tolerable.
