How much money do Ripple and Ethereum founders have?

Yesterday they beat TWO records in the world of cryptocurrencies: the value per currency of Etereum exceeded 1000 dollars, and the rise in the price of the ripple caused one of its founders, Chris Larsen, to boost its net worth up to 59,900 million Dollars (Which makes it one of the richest men in the world above the founders of Google). Although the bubble of speculation around cryptocurrencies is very real, these gains are paper wealth and currencies can not be more different.


A difference of Bitcoin, which is not known if it is a currency or a deposit of value, Ethereum is advertised as a platform of blockchain applications in which transactions are used to pay for the decentralized computing capacity. (Until now, the most visible of these applications has been the breeding and trade of digital cats). Despite these intentions, the high value of the currency has much less to do with this type of applications than with almost 20 times the value of Bitcoin last year.

Ripple is the least public Its main proposal is the possibility of traversing and cheap, mainly between banks, through a separate entity - but related - called Ripple Connect. The Ripple currency (XRP) is independent, with the hope that banks will use it someday through Ripple Connect. It can not be used, like other currencies, and its value has not yet reached $ 4, despite the fact that the second largest market capitalization is behind Bitcoin.

The differences do not end there. Larsen, a man in his 50s, has experience in financial startups, and Ripple's other co-founder, Jed McCaleb, is known for creating p2p software such as eDonkey, in addition to being the original owner of the Bitcoin exchange house Mt. Gox . The co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, is only 23 years old and left the university after receiving a scholarship from Thiel.

More related to its potential wealth is its level of centralization, which is reflected both in the way in which transactions are validated (work test system that will change a test system of participation in the case of Ethereum, and consensus in the case of Ripple) and in what percentage of their respective currencies the founders maintain. In addition to a 17% stake in the company, it is believed that there are 5900 million XRP in the personal war chest of Larsen, just over 5% of all the XRPs in circulation.


In a February 2016 response from Reddit, Buterin claims to have approximately 630,000 Ether (ETH), and by the end of April it said it had sold around 25% of its capital. With less than 0.5% of the total ETH in circulation, it remains (in theory) a multimillion dollar. However, some of the founders have been able to withdraw their total capital, because it is assumed that as much as the Larsen expect products to continue to increase in adoption and value, and because the board is likely to become a panic among investors.

So ALTHOUGH Larson could not be, as he said the head of the UN, "richer than the founders of Google" and Etereum is EXPERIMENTING almost with total certainty The same wild speculation that gave a knowledge of the Bitcoin technical shortcomings, really There are people who are getting rich with cryptocurrencies. But we probably are not you or me.