Analysis of Vitalik's holdings: Total net asset value exceeds US$800 million, with ETH accounting for over 90%

Original title: VITALIK BUTERIN'S NET WORTH (UPDATED)
Original source: ARKHAM Research Team

Original translation: Block unicorn

 

Editor's note: This article was first published on January 8, 2024. Some data is lagging, so readers are advised to refer to it with caution. The price of ETH was about $2,200 on the day the article was first published. Today, the price of ETH is $3,486. Therefore, according to the current price, Vitalik Buterin's ETH holdings have exceeded $830 million.

 

Vitalik Buterin's net worth is estimated to be at least $830 million. The following information is from the ARKHAM data archive.

 

This article will explore the net worth of Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum) and its fluctuations over time. We will examine the Ethereum co-founder’s known cryptocurrency holdings and compare them to other top ETH holders and the holdings of other Ethereum co-founders. We will also examine other possible sources of Buterin’s wealth and provide context to the size of those wealth.

 

How Did VITALIK BUTERIN Get Rich?

 

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has amassed most of his known wealth as a coin creator. In 2011, at the age of 17, Buterin began to enter the cryptocurrency space by founding Bitcoin Magazine with Mihai Alisie (who later became one of the co-founders of Ethereum). While founding Bitcoin Magazine, Buterin and Alisie were also developing Egora, a decentralized Bitcoin eBay. He was unhappy with Bitcoin’s limitations, such as its limited scripting language, which limited Bitcoin’s ability to run more complex smart contracts and decentralized applications. Subsequently, Buterin published the Ethereum whitepaper in November 2013 (at the age of 19), proposing Ethereum as a solution to Bitcoin’s upgrade.

 

In the months following the release of the white paper, Buterin met his co-founders. He first worked with Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, and Amir Chetrit. Later, Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke joined, and together they founded the Ethereum Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the development of the Ethereum network. In June 2014, Buterin received a $100,000 grant from the Thiel Foundation, allowing him to drop out of the University of Waterloo, where he was studying, to focus on the development of Ethereum.

 

Ethereum held a presale in the summer of 2014, where participants purchased ETH with BTC. The initial supply of ETH at the time was over 72 million, of which 16.53% was allocated to the founders, and the ETH allocated to the founders constitutes the majority of Buterin's net worth.

 

Ethereum was officially launched on July 30, 2015. Buterin is the only founder still working on the network, as the others have left to pursue other projects. He has overseen the development of the network, including the transition from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS) in 2022.

 

Most of Buterin's known cryptocurrency holdings come from the ETH allocation he received when Ethereum was launched, and he became a billionaire when the price of ETH broke through $3,000 in 2021. In addition, Buterin has invested in some crypto companies, such as StarkNet (STRK), which also contributed to his total wealth.

 

Buterin was born on January 31, 1994, in Kolomna, Russia. His family moved to Canada when he was 6 years old, and he later graduated from Abelard School (a private high school) in Toronto. Buterin was very talented from a young age, and there are unconfirmed and unfounded rumors online that he has an IQ of 257. While this is almost impossible on any reasonable IQ test, there is no doubt that he is very talented and has a high IQ, which has helped him achieve extraordinary wealth.

 

How Rich is Vitalik Buterin? Net Worth Overview

 

Vitalik Buterin's known net worth is estimated to be approximately $552.86 million ($830 million today). His actual net worth is likely higher because it includes his known cryptocurrency holdings, any unknown cryptocurrency holdings, and his non-cryptocurrency holdings, such as his equity in some investments.

 

In this section, we will explore his cryptocurrency holdings, both ETH and non-ETH holdings, as well as any non-cryptocurrency holdings he may have.

 

How Much Crypto Does Vitalik Buterin Own?

 

Currently, Vitalik Buterin’s known cryptocurrency holdings are $552.86 million. The majority of this comes from his ETH holdings, which is approximately 246, 730 coins. Buterin’s cryptocurrency holdings can be estimated by looking at his known Ethereum wallet addresses. While this does not rule out the existence of any undisclosed wallets, given the size of Buterin’s holdings in known wallets, these holdings likely make up the majority of his net worth.

 

We can see these holdings and how they’ve changed over time on Buterin’s profile page on Arkham:

 

 

Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum Holdings

 

According to a 2018 tweet, Buterin claims he’s never held more than about 0.9% of the total ETH supply.

 

 

To verify Buterin’s claim, we can check what percentage of the total ETH supply he holds by looking at his ETH holdings in known wallets from 2015 to the present. We can see how much ETH he’s held over the years by looking at the Portfolio Profile section of his Arkham profile.

 

 

With this information, we can estimate his holdings as a percentage of the total ETH supply for each year. The table below shows his holdings on December 31st of each year as a benchmark for his ETH holdings for the corresponding year. His holdings on December 8th, 2023 are also included to represent his most recently known ETH holdings.

 

 

We can see that Buterin's claim appears to be correct. His known ETH holdings have never significantly exceeded 0.9%, with 2015 being the year he owned the most of the total ETH supply at 0.91%. In fact, his ETH holdings have been decreasing each year due to the apparent token sales and the network inflation design that increase the total ETH supply each year.

 

Buterin’s ETH Holder Rankings

 

To assess the significance of Buterin’s ETH holdings, we compared it to the holdings of other top ETH holders. The entities holding the most ETH tokens can be easily identified by looking at the top holders section of Ethereum’s profile on Arkham.

 

 

Who are the largest Ethereum holders?

 

The following table shows the top 20 ETH holders by entity as of the time of writing:

 

 

The ETH 2 deposit smart contract tops the list with 34,259,215.29 tokens held, as validators must deposit their ETH tokens in the contract to participate in the validation process.

 

Coinbase and Binance are in second and third place, respectively. Most entities ahead of Buterin appear to be exchanges like Kraken and Robinhood, and institutional managers like Grayscale, which all hold large amounts of ETH for their operations. Exchanges hold large amounts of ETH to facilitate withdrawals and token swaps for users, while Grayscale’s ETH holdings, on the other hand, reflect its investment in ETH tokens.

 

Buterin appears to be the main individual ETH holder with access to his tokens. While Rain Lohmus owns around 250,000 ETH, which he paid $75,000 for in the ETH presale, he cannot access these tokens because he forgot his private keys.

 

Vitalik Buterin’s Cryptocurrency Net Worth Over Time

 

By looking at Buterin’s portfolio profile in his Arkham profile, we can clearly see the fluctuations in his known cryptocurrency holdings over the years. The table below records his known cryptocurrency holdings on December 31st of each year as a benchmark for the corresponding year. The table also includes his estimated cryptocurrency net worth on November 18, 2021, when ETH briefly reached a peak price of $4,891 - which would represent the peak of Buterin’s known net worth.

 

 

From December 31, 2015 to the present, Buterin’s net worth has increased more than 900 times, from $596,760 to $55.122 billion. The highest annual percentage increase in his net worth was from $4.23 million on December 31, 2016 to $27.837 billion on December 31, 2017, which was during the 2017 bull run.

 

Buterin's net worth in known cryptocurrencies is heavily influenced by ETH price fluctuations, as ETH accounts for more than 99% of his portfolio. Therefore, whenever ETH prices rise, Buterin's net worth will also rise. Whenever ETH prices fall, his net worth will also fall from its all-time highs.

 

In 2021, when the price of ETH broke through $3,000, Buterin became a billionaire at the age of 27, with a known cryptocurrency net worth of more than $1 billion. At the peak of the bull market on November 18, 2021, Buterin's net worth briefly touched $2.09 billion as the price of ETH reached an all-time high of $4,891.

 

However, the cryptocurrency bear market hit again and the price of ETH fell. Before December 31, 2021, Buterin held $1.2 billion in ETH, and by December 31, 2022, his account was only worth $300.58 million. Since then, his known crypto net worth has rebounded, reaching $550 million as of this writing, when ETH was trading at $2,234 (now trading at $3,395, or about $8,375 in total assets).

 

 

Another factor that has influenced the change in his known crypto net worth is that his known ETH holdings appear to be decreasing every year, and Buterin has been known to sell his ETH holdings several times. For example, in May 2023, Buterin sent 200 ETH to a cryptocurrency exchange, and the Ethereum Foundation then sold 15,000 ETH. Notably, Buterin claims that he has not sold ETH for personal gain since 2018. He further clarified that when he sent ETH to exchanges, it was for donations rather than for sale.

 

Non-ETH Cryptocurrency Holdings

 

According to data from Arkham’s portfolio archive, we can see Buterin’s non-ETH holdings. As of the time of writing, some of his major non-ETH token holdings include:

 

1. 869,500 KNCL (the token of the decentralized liquidity protocol Kyber Network, for which Buterin serves as an advisor), worth approximately $609,780.

 

2. 196.42 Wrapped Ether (WETH) tokens, worth approximately $436,920

 

101 million THE tokens, worth approximately $127,950.

 

While not Buterin’s major non-ETH holdings, the following tokens are also worth noting:

 

1. $1,290 worth of Tornado.Cash’s TORN token. This is related to Vitalik’s use of the infamous coin mixer. His Arkham profile shows multiple fund transfers using Tornado Cash, which he said included donations to Ukraine.

 

 

2. 6,345,000 Shiba Inu coins ($SHIB), valued at $6,065 million. In 2020, Vitalik received 50% of the token supply directly from its developers at the time of the token’s launch, which briefly spiked his known crypto net worth to around $10 billion. The move was intended to create huge hype for the token through its association with one of the most famous figures in the cryptocurrency space. Buterin then destroyed 4.1 trillion $SHIB tokens, which represented more than 90% of the total amount of tokens he received, which were worth about $6 billion at the time. He then donated the remaining 50.69 trillion $SHIB tokens to CryptoRelief in India, which were worth $1.56 billion at the time.

 

 

Non-cryptocurrency holdings

 

Buterin participated in the seed round of StarkWare, a zero-knowledge proof technology developer that has been valued at $8 billion as of 2022.

 

Due to the lack of public data on his non-crypto assets, it is difficult to estimate the value of his non-crypto holdings and their impact on his overall net worth - however, we can speculate that if he still holds on to his investment in StarkWare, the value of that investment would increase a portion of his net worth, as well as the value of any other undisclosed investments.

 

Other Ethereum Co-founders

 

Like Buterin, other Ethereum co-founders have also benefited financially from their ETH holdings. In this section, we compare Buterin's estimated net worth to that of other Ethereum co-founders. For this section, we consider his known cryptocurrency holdings of $552.86 billion (as of June 30, 2024, now worth $800 million) as all or most of his net worth, as we have no way of knowing the specific size of his non-crypto holdings.

 

Below is a table of the publicly estimated net worths of the other co-founders (note: since 2023 net worth estimates for some co-founders are not necessarily available, some of the data is from the last known available point and may mark the peak of their net worth, or be significantly lower than it is currently):

 

 

 

Conclusion

 

In summary, we have estimated the composition of Vitalik Buterin's net worth and how it fluctuates over time. The majority of his wealth of over $500 million (now $830 million due to price increases) comes from his holdings of Ethereum (ETH), which fluctuate with the price of Ethereum. Stay tuned to his profile for the latest updates on Buterin's wealth.