Bitcoin has been one of the fastest-growing financial assets of the past decade. Created as the first digital currency for mass use, this cryptocurrency has experienced extreme volatility. From an early recorded price of roughly $0.001 per bitcoin to peaks above $20,000, small early investments turned into substantial fortunes for some. But who holds the largest BTC reserves in the world?
In this Bitcoin rich list, we present five well-known figures and entities with the largest known holdings in bitcoin.
Top 15: the highest valued Bitcoin addresses
Because the blockchain is public, we can inspect the richest Bitcoin addresses. Services aggregate this data and present it in an accessible format. Bitinfocharts, for example, publishes a list of the wealthiest Bitcoin addresses worldwide and has been able to identify several wallet owners.
Several addresses on that list belong to cold storage wallets controlled by major exchanges. The top address, with holdings exceeding $2 billion, is associated with Huobi.
Other exchange addresses, including wallets linked to Binance, Bitfinex, Bittrex and Coinbase, also appear on the list. However, some addresses belong to unidentified users whose identities remain unknown.
The second richest address corresponds to an unidentified entity. A transaction exceeding $1 billion in 2019 sparked intense curiosity about the mysterious owner of that wallet.
Our Bitcoin Rich List: five known figures with the largest BTC reserves
#5: Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss
The Winklevoss twins are entrenched in cryptocurrency culture. Now in their thirties, Cameron and Tyler built significant wealth through early investments in tech and the internet, and they publicly linked themselves to Bitcoin in 2013. At that time they claimed to hold roughly 1% of all bitcoins in existence.
Estimates of their current crypto holdings vary. Forbes has placed their cryptocurrency assets between $900 million and $1.1 billion, while other sources estimate their holdings at about $1.3 billion. Beyond Bitcoin, the twins have reportedly invested in Ethereum, ZCash, Litecoin, Tezos and Gemini Dollar, and they founded the Gemini exchange.
#4: Chris Larsen — angel investor and former Ripple executive
Chris Larsen’s inclusion reflects the broader definition of “crypto fortunes” that include major holdings in coins other than Bitcoin. Larsen, a co-founder and former executive at Ripple, retained a substantial reserve of XRP tokens. XRP differs from many cryptocurrencies because a company — Ripple Labs — controls a large portion of its supply.
According to reporting by Forbes, Larsen’s holdings include roughly 5.19 billion XRP, which at times has corresponded to about $1.4 billion in value. His overall net worth has been estimated at around $7 billion, making him one of the wealthiest known figures in the cryptocurrency sector.
#3: Changpeng Zhao (CZ)
Changpeng Zhao, widely known as CZ, is a central figure in the industry. A Chinese-Canadian developer and entrepreneur, CZ worked on projects such as Blockchain.com before founding Binance, now the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.
Through his early involvement in crypto and his leadership of Binance, CZ has accumulated significant cryptocurrency holdings. Estimates place his crypto net worth in excess of $2 billion.
#2: Joseph Lubin — the ‘crypto billionaire in the shadows’
Joseph Lubin is a prominent Ethereum co-founder and the CEO of ConsenSys, a Brooklyn-based company focused on decentralized applications and infrastructure. While Vitalik Buterin is the most recognized public face of Ethereum, Lubin played a major role in the project’s early development and in building the Ethereum ecosystem.
Forbes and other outlets have offered wide-ranging estimates of Lubin’s cryptocurrency wealth, suggesting holdings between $1 billion and $5 billion. His investments and business ventures in the Ethereum ecosystem have contributed to his reputation as a quietly influential crypto billionaire.
#1: Satoshi Nakamoto — the largest bitcoin fortune
The pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, credited with publishing Bitcoin’s 2008 whitepaper and mining its earliest blocks, is widely believed to control the largest single cache of bitcoins. Because early mining involved a small group of contributors, Nakamoto’s early participation resulted in an unusually large stake.
Researchers have tried to estimate Nakamoto’s holdings by analyzing early mining patterns and addresses. A July 2020 study by Whale Alert examined coins mined during Bitcoin’s formative years and identified addresses likely controlled by Nakamoto. That research estimated around 1,125,150 bitcoins attributed to Satoshi, with an estimated value of at least $10.9 billion at the time of the study.
Using bitcoin prices current at the time this article was written, that stash would be worth well over $12 billion. Whether Nakamoto is a single person or a group remains unknown. Regardless, the entity behind the name would hold the largest bitcoin fortune known and rank among the world’s most significant billionaires.