An old investment by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian in the leading altcoin Ethereum has emerged. Here are the details…
Reddit founder’s altcoin investment revealed
Social media site Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian reportedly purchased 50,000 ETH for just $15,000 during the cryptocurrency’s pre-sale in 2014, which amounts to just 30 cents per coin. Ohanian, who left the social media giant in 2020, said in an article for Forbes on Feb. 21 that he found the idea of a decentralized store of value partly very appealing, prompting him to take an early Ethereum gamble. Ohanian’s statements include the following statements:
Any group of people who have in their consciousness or their collective history the idea of being persecuted, especially by a state, finds the idea of hiding a value not controlled by a single state very appealing. So, in some ways, it stuck with me at the time and somehow made me open to the idea of a decentralized currency.
At current prices, this investment represents an increase of 549,589 percent and is worth $82.5 million, according to CoinMarketCap. Ohanian is a big proponent of self-custody, as he dislikes confiscated property. It manages the private keys of some of its most valuable crypto-related investments to ensure they are kept away from exchanges that are more vulnerable to the prying arms of governments. But recently, as we’ve reported as Cryptokoin.com, the focus of regulators, especially in the US, is on cryptocurrencies.
Ohanian “could have invested more” in ETH
When Ohanian heard about Ethereum at a meeting with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, he claimed that developers saw the potential to create a wide variety of potentially impregnable assets such as nonfungible tokens (NFTs) on top of it. As a result, he made his first investment in ETH, but said in the interview, “looking back, I didn’t invest nearly as much as I should have.” Ohanian founded venture capital firm 776 in 2020, using the proceeds from his initial investments in ETH and Coinbase, which has invested in 29 crypto-related startups and raised $500 million in February 2022 to fund similar investments.
In line with Ohanian’s views that bear markets offer investors the opportunity to buy assets at discounted prices, the firm saw the recent market downturn as the perfect time to place long-term bets on the crypto industry. The firm currently has over $750 million in assets under management. Ohanian said that while the cryptocurrency is extremely volatile, “there are many people who are conscious of seeing mass inflation.” This makes the volatility of cryptocurrencies much more acceptable to these people.
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