Forbes Publishes ‘First-Ever’ Richest People In Cryptocurrency List

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Introduction

Forbes is a bi-weekly business magazine headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey. It features original write-ups on finance, investing, marketing, and topics across different industries. Forbes also publishes updates on related topics like science and technology, law and politics.
The magazine is popular for its rankings of the richest Americans (the Forbes 400), list of the world's top companies (the Forbes Global 2000), The World's Billionaires and more. Forbes magazine's motto is: "The Capitalist Tool".

Its chairman and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes, and its CEO is Mike Perlis. It was announced on July 18, 2014 that a majority stake in the publisher had been sold to a group of investors through their vehicle Integrated Whale Media Investments.
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Why did Forbes publish this list?

“Our first-ever Crypto Rich list provides a snapshot of a pivotal moment, part of the transparency needed to pull crypto away from its provenance as an unknown currency,” said Randall Lane, Chief Content Officer, Forbes Media.
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Methodology

Given the secrecy and hyper-volatility in the crypto-space, Forbes adapted the strategy of quoting ranges instead of fixed figures. Though many have questioned their listings from the beginning (from their first publications), they disclaim accuracy and acknowledge than many factors simply cannot be accounted for when estimating someone's net worth.

These numbers are based on estimated holdings of cryptocurrencies (a few provided proof), post-tax profits from trading crypto-assets and stakes in crypto-related businesses.
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When putting together the necessarily approximate figures along with the list of crypto's wealthiest people, the values used were as of Friday, January 19, 2018. The Rich list is divided into five groups: builders, idealists, opportunists, establishment investors and infrastructure players. Many members of the list fit into more than one group.

Crypto’s Richest Men

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Chris Larsen is on top of the list. He is a Stanford M.B.A. and veteran operator at Silicon Valley. At the peak of the market in January, he fleetingly had a wealth of around $20 billion. Most of it came from his 5.2 billion XRP, Ripple's token. The company he co-founded with Jed McCaleb in 2012 facilitates international payments for banks utilizing the blockchain. His company controls 61% of the total XRP in supply. Forbes calculates his net worth based only on his personal XRP stake and the value of his 17% share in Ripple, against the company's most recent price assessment: $410 million. Mitsubishi Financial, Bank of America and Santander are among Ripple's 100-plus customers.

Forbes admits that they might have left some people off the list and that their approximations/calculations may be “wide off the mark.”

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The list includes Changpeng Zhao, a 41-year-old Chinese-Canadian programmer who runs Binance, an exchange that went from a cold start to the largest in the world in less than 180 days. 19 people are on the list. You can click on each member of the list on Forbes’s website to see the actual figures and details.

Steves Forbes’ interview with Brian Singer on blockchain technology.

Is Bitcoin the currency in the future or is it the payment system they’re developing?

-It's the payment system. It's the blockchain encryption and they’re very interesting things. I think bitcoin or really, the blockchain encryption behind it has a greater ability to bring more of the world’s population out of poverty than anything we've seen. For one thing, it's a cheap payment system, but it’s more important than that. Blockchain cryptography is about digital transfer of ownership in a completely transparent and public way... That means that I can actually record ownership in public by digital means. 50% of the world's population has a mobile phone. I read an estimate this month that in 2020, 90% of the world's population will have a mobile phone. That's probably a high estimate but that’s ok. One of the most powerful things to the economy and the creation of wealth is the ownership of property. When you own something, you take care of it and develop it for the future. The best thing you can do for the environment is to own it. Because if you own it, you’ll make sure it’s sustainable and usable for your future family. -And that's powerful. But many people living in poverty don't have the ability to own properties like houses. If you live in a shanty town, you operate outside of the legal economy. It's not that you want to operate outside of the legal economy but you have no ownership of any property. -And once you introduce blockchain cryptography, they can have a public ledger of ownership and transfer that cannot be denied because it’s absolutely transparent. It is the means through which these individuals can bring themselves out of poverty. It is so much more profound than that, but it is the very basis. It has the ability to give these individuals the right of ownership to property and that has more than anything else the ability to bring them out of poverty. And I can't wait... It will be adopted elsewhere. It will be used by banks as well as credit card companies.

It will become a standard.

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