Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian allegedly paid about $15,000 for 50,000 ETH, or roughly 30 cents for each coin in 2014, during the presale of the cryptocurrency.
Reddit co-founder, who departed the social media behemoth in 2020, said in a Forbes piece published on February 21 that his Armenian origin contributed to his attraction to the notion of a decentralized store of value and that this led him to make an early investment in Ethereum.
“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.”
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 describe how the Armenian genocide in World War 1 caused his family’s legacy of antique carpets to be taken by Turkish forces, which sparked his interest in “unseizable property.”
Ohanian, who strongly supports self-custody due to his dislike of seized property, handles the private keys to some of his most significant crypto-related assets to keep them off exchanges that are more susceptible to government snooping.
Ohanian stated he recognized the possibility for developers to create a broad variety of possibly unseizable assets such as nonfungible tokens (NFTs) on top of Ethereum when he first heard about it in a meeting with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.
He so made his first Ether investment, but later said in an interview that “in retrospect, I didn’t spend nearly as much as I should have.”
With the money from his early investments in Ether and Coinbase, Ohanian formed the venture capital company 776 in 2020. The business has invested in 29 cryptocurrency-related firms and raised $500 million in February 2022 to fund more similar investments.
The company has seen the most recent market slump as the ideal moment to place long-term bets on the cryptocurrency sector, in keeping with Ohanian’s beliefs that bear markets give investors with the chance to acquire assets at reduced rates. The company presently manages over 750 million dollars in assets.
Ohanian pointed out that although there are many individuals who “have the generational awareness of experiencing tremendous inflation,” crypto’s volatility is far more tolerable for these folks despite the fact that it is incredibly volatile.
