Alexis Ohanian is a cryptocurrency bull who utilized the earnings from his early Ether investment to launch a crypto-focused venture capital business.
Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of the social media website Reddit, allegedly purchased 50,000 Ether for just $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 notion of a decentralized store of value appealed to him, in part because of his Armenian roots, pushing him to making 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 carpets 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 assets, 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 recognized the potential for developers to construct a broad variety of possibly unseizable assets on top of it, such as nonfungible tokens (NFTs).
As a consequence, he made his first Ether investment, but said in the interview that “in retrospect, I didn’t spend nearly as much as I should have.”
In 2020, Ohanian formed venture capital company 776 using money from his early investments in Ether and Coinbase. The business has invested in 29 crypto-related firms and plans to raise $500 million in February 2022 to fund more investments.
In keeping with Ohanian’s belief that bear markets enable investors to purchase assets at a discount, the business sees the current market dip as the ideal opportunity to make long-term bets on the crypto sector.
The business presently manages more than $750 million in assets.
While crypto is incredibly unpredictable, Ohanian remarked that “there are plenty of individuals who have the generational awareness of experiencing tremendous inflation,” which makes crypto’s volatility far more bearable.