The co-founder of the popular internet forum Reddit, Alexis Ohanian, is rumored to have bought 50,000 Ether in the pre-sale for $15,000 in 2014, paying just $0.30 per Ethereum. Ohanian eventually left Reddit in 2020, telling Forbes in a February 21 interview that he found the idea of a decentralized store of value interesting.
Interest due to origin
According to Ohanian, this interest in a decentralized store of value is based on his Armenian origins. “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 a state attractive. And so it was ingrained in me in a way, and in a way made me receptive to the idea of a decentralized currency,” said Ohanian.
At the time of writing, his investment is worth a whopping $82.5 million. This means that his original investment has increased by 549,589 percent. It is not clear from the interview when Ohanian sold his Ethers and how many he still has from that period. All he says is that “with today’s knowledge” he should have bought a lot more.
What did he do with this money?
Ultimately, Ohanian used the profits from his early investments in Ethereum and Coinbase to found venture capital firm 776 in 2020. The company has already invested in 29 crypto-related startups and raised another $500 million in February 2022 for similar investments.
In line with Ohanian’s view that the bear market is an opportunity for investors to buy assets at a discount, his firm saw this as the perfect time to make long-term investments. At the time of writing, the firm has $750 million in assets under management.
While Ohanian also acknowledges that crypto is quite volatile, he indicates that there are plenty of people in the industry who have experienced massive inflation. For them, that volatility is a lot easier to swallow, because they are in fact used to those price fluctuations.
