For $15K, the co-founder of Reddit purchased 50,000 Ether during the pre-sale.
Alexis Ohanian is a cryptocurrency bull who utilized the earnings from his early Ether investment to launch a crypto-focused venture capital firm.
Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of the social media website Reddit, reportedly purchased 50,000 Ether for only $15,000 during the cryptocurrency’s presale in 2014, at a cost of about 30 cents per coin.
Ohanian, who left Facebook in 2020, told Forbes on Feb. 21 that the idea of a decentralized store of value appealed to him, in part because of his Armenian roots, pushing him to make an early bet on Ethereum.
According to CoinMarketCap, this investment is now worth $82.5 million at current rates, showing a 549,589% growth.
He went on to tell how Turkish forces confiscated his family’s antique rugs during the Armenian genocide in World War I, which sparked his interest in “unseizable property.”
Ohanian is a strong supporter of self-custody due to his antipathy to seizing property. He handles the private keys to some of his most significant crypto-related investments, keeping them away from exchanges that are more exposed to government eavesdropping.
Ohanian stated that when he first learned about Ethereum during a meeting with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, he recognised the potential for developers to build a wide range of possibly unseizable assets on top of it, such as nonfungible tokens (NFTs).
As a result, he made his first Ether investment, but said in the interview that “in hindsight, I didn’t invest nearly as much as I should have.”
In 2020, Ohanian formed venture capital firm 776 with money from his early investments in Ether and Coinbase. The firm has invested in 29 crypto-related startups and plans to raise $500 million in February 2022 to fund additional investments.
In keeping with Ohanian’s belief that bear markets allow investors to purchase assets at a discount, the firm sees the current market dip as the ideal time to make long-term bets on the crypto industry.
The firm presently manages more than $750 million in assets.
Although crypto is incredibly unpredictable, Ohanian remarked that “there are plenty of individuals who have the generational consciousness of seeing tremendous inflation,” which makes crypto’s volatility far more bearable.