They may contain lost the battle for Facebook Inc. (FB), but the Winklevoss twins have made a good fortune of their bitcoin venture. The spectacular run-up in bitcoin’s price has figure out them the digital currency’s first publicly-known billionaires.
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss occupied $11 million from their $65 million payout from their Facebook lawsuit against Smear Zuckerberg to invest in bitcoin back in 2013. At that time, the cryptocurrency was figured around $120 and the Winklevoss twins claimed to own almost 1% of all bitcoin in diffusion. The price of a single bitcoin is above $11,000 now and the cryptocurrency’s market capitalization is $187.6 billion, as of this poem. Hence, the total value of bitcoins held by the twins is worth more than one billion dollars.
In an vet with the Financial Times last year, the Winklevoss twins bring up they “see bitcoin as potentially the greatest social network because it is drew to transfer value over the Internet.” They claim bitcoin is sport than gold and “matches or beats” the precious metal across its nine foundational features, such as scarcity and portability. (See also: Winklevoss Interview: Bitcoin Payment Arrangement Worth $400 Billion.)
The twins have mostly focused on erection an ecosystem for bitcoins that will attract institutional investors and day merchants to the cryptocurrency. They started Gemini, the world’s first regulated and empowered digital currency exchange. The exchange is regulated as a trust by the New York Status Department of Financial Services (NYFDS).
Gemini was among several cryptocurrency dealings that suffered outages during last week’s bitcoin barter frenzy. However, the twins’ application to start a Winklevoss Bitcoin Upon, an ETF, on the Bats exchange was denied by the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) in March 2017. But the domination agency announced last week that it was reviewing that determination. (See also: SEC Denies Winklevoss Twins ETF Application.)
To be sure, the Winklevoss couples are not the only ones to have profited from bitcoin’s rise. The still-unknown Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin’s inventor, is reportedly the holder of 980,000 currencies, which is worth approximately $11 billion based on current bounty levels of over $11,000 per coin. Other prominent investors of bitcoin lessened their investments in the cryptocurrency through sale or by moving it to other currencies, such as Bitcoin Liquidate. The Winklevoss twins claim to have not sold a single bitcoin since their 2013 buying. (See also: Who Are The Top 5 Bitcoin Millionaires?)