Winklevoss brothers top Forbes Bitcoin billionaires list

Major business magazine Forbes has featured Gemini co-founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss as the richest Bitcoin (BTC) billionaires.

Compiled by Forbes crypto-focused reporter Michael del Castillo, the ranking provides a list of Bitcoin investors that won the most from Bitcoin’s massive surge up to $42,000 in early January 2021. 

The ranking includes three Bitcoin investors with an estimated crypto net worth above $1 billion, including the Winklevoss brothers, major industry investor Tim Draper and Matthew Roszak, chairman and co-founder of blockchain firm Bloq. The twins topped the list with an estimated cryptocurrency net worth of around $1.4 billion apiece. Roszak and Draper follow with net worths estimated at $1.2 billion and $1.1 billion, respectively.

The list also includes three crypto investors like Microstrategy CEO Michael Saylor, Galaxy Digital CEO and founder Mike Novogratz, and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. According to Forbes data, Saylor’s crypto fortune amounts to $600 million, while Novogratz and Buterin’s crypto net worths stand at $478 million and $360 million, respectively.

Castillo stressed that the newly released ranking is “by no means a complete ranking but captures just how much some fortunes have soared.” According to the expert, the Bitcoin bull run generated at least five billionaires, or “possibly quite a few more.” Castillo said that the rankings are based on publicly available digital wallet data. “Using everything from publicly available digital wallets to old-fashioned reporting, we set out to identify some of the biggest winners of this latest crypto boom,” he said.

On Jan. 8, 2021, Bitcoin price set a new all-time high of $42,000, following a massive rally after finally breaking $20,000 by the end of 2020. Shortly after hitting $42,000, Bitcoin saw a major correction below $31,000 on Jan. 11. 

But according to its network fundamentals, Bitcoin price could be heading toward recovery, as Cointelegraph reported yesterday. Indeed, Bitcoin saw a notable 20% recovery from its recent bloodbath on Jan. 12. At publishing time, Bitcoin is trading at $35,833, up about 9% over the past 24 hours, according to Cointelegraph’s Bitcoin price index. Over the past 30 days, Bitcoin is up more than 85%.