Forbes Publishes ‘First-Ever’ Richest People In Cryptocurrency List

Forbes , known for its “World’s Billionaires List”, published a list of the richest people in cryptocurrency for the first time, Tuesday Feb. 6.
The goal of publishing such a list, according to Forbes Editor Randall Lane, is to
“[provide] a snapshot of a pivotal moment, part of the transparency needed to pull crypto away from its provenance as the favorite currency of drug dealers and into the adolescence of a legitimate asset class.”
While compiling a list of the world’s traditional billionaires is a relatively straightforward task, calculating the exact amount of wealth of the world’s richest crypto tycoons is more difficult.
Cryptocurrencies are by definition a decentralized, encrypted payment system that began outside of the traditional global financial system. The “newly minted crypto rich ,” as described by Forbes staff writer Jeff Kauflin, “live in a strange milieu that blends paranoid secrecy with ostentatious display .”
The Forbes “Richest People in Cryptocurrency” list is broken up into five categories: “idealists, builders, opportunists, infrastructure players and establishment investors.” In order to make the Forbes list, one must have accrued over $350 million.
Instead of static numbers, the net worths of the people on the list are listed in ranges, calculated based on the “estimated holdings of cryptocurrencies (a few provided proof), post-tax profits from trading crypto-assets and stakes in crypto-related businesses .”
Forbes acknowledges that they could have left some people off the list and that their estimates may be “wide of the mark .”
CryptoWeekly, a cryptocurrency newsletter, released a comparable list of the top 100 most influential people in the crypto community . Their list is factored not by net worth, but by the research and technological contributions a person has made in the world of crypto.
Among those who were left out of Forbes’ richest in crypto rankings, but included in the CryptoWeekly influential list, are important crypto players like
Litecoin founder Charlie Lee , Bitcoin investor Roger Ver , and crypto pioneer
Nick Szabo , among others.