According to Arkham’s analysis, Vitalik Buterin’s estimated net worth is $860 million. This article explores his asset situation, including his cryptocurrency holdings and total estimated net worth, and compares it to other Ethereum whales. This article is sourced from the ARKHAM Research Team and compiled by Block unicorn.
Table of Contents
1. How did Vitalik Buterin become wealthy?
2. How wealthy is Vitalik Buterin? Overview of net worth
3. How much cryptocurrency does Vitalik Buterin own?
4. Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum holdings
5. Buterin’s ETH holdings ranking
6. Variation of Vitalik’s cryptocurrency net worth over time
7. Non-ETH cryptocurrency holdings
8. Non-cryptocurrency holdings
9. Other Ethereum co-founders
10. Conclusion
This article will explore Vitalik Buterin’s (the founder of Ethereum) net worth and its fluctuations over time. We will examine the known cryptocurrency holdings of this Ethereum co-founder and compare them to other top ETH holders and other Ethereum co-founders’ holdings.
Additionally, we will examine Buterin’s potential other sources of wealth and provide context for the scale of these fortunes.
As the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin has accumulated a significant portion of his known wealth.
In 2011, at the age of 17, Buterin entered the cryptocurrency field and co-founded “Bitcoin Magazine” with Mihai Alisie (who later became one of the co-founders of Ethereum). While co-founding “Bitcoin Magazine,” Buterin and Alisie were also developing Egora, a decentralized Bitcoin eBay.
He was dissatisfied with the limitations of Bitcoin, such as its limited scripting language, which restricted Bitcoin from executing more complex smart contracts and decentralized applications. Subsequently, Buterin released the Ethereum whitepaper in November 2013 (when he was only 19 years old), proposing Ethereum as an upgrade to Bitcoin.
In the months following the release of the whitepaper, Buterin met his co-founders. He first collaborated with Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, and Amir Chetrit.
Subsequently, Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke joined, and together they established 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 his studies at the University of Waterloo and focus on Ethereum’s development.
In the summer of 2014, Ethereum conducted a presale, where participants purchased ETH with BTC. At that time, the initial supply of ETH exceeded 72 million tokens, with 16.53% allocated to the founders. This allocation of ETH constituted a significant portion of Buterin’s net worth.
Ethereum officially launched on July 30, 2015. Buterin is the only co-founder still working on the network, as 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 during Ethereum’s release. When the price of ETH surpassed $3,000 in 2021, he briefly became a billionaire. Additionally, Buterin has invested in some cryptocurrency companies, such as StarkNet (STRK), which has contributed to his overall wealth.
Buterin was born on January 31, 1994, in Kolomna, Russia. His family moved to Canada when he was six years old, and he later graduated from Abelard School, a private high school in Toronto. Buterin has been rumored to have an IQ of 257, although this is highly unlikely and unverified. However, it is clear that he is highly intelligent, which has helped him achieve extraordinary wealth.
Vitalik Buterin’s net worth, according to Arkham’s analysis, is estimated to be around $860 million. His actual net worth may be higher as it includes his known cryptocurrency holdings, any undisclosed cryptocurrency holdings, and his non-cryptocurrency holdings, such as equity in some investments.
As of now, the majority of Vitalik Buterin’s assets come from his ETH holdings, which amount to approximately 245,278 tokens. Buterin’s cryptocurrency holdings can be estimated by examining his known Ethereum wallet addresses. Although this does not rule out the existence of undisclosed wallets, given the scale of his holdings in known wallets, these holdings likely constitute a significant portion of his net worth.
We can see these holdings and their variations over time on Buterin’s personal page on Arkham:
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According to a tweet from 2018, Buterin claimed to have never held more than 0.9% of the total ETH supply.
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To verify Buterin’s claim, we can examine his ETH holdings in known wallets from 2015 to the present to check the proportion of his holdings to the total ETH supply. We can view the amount of ETH he has held over the years in the portfolio section of his profile on Arkham.
Using this information, we can estimate the percentage of the total ETH supply that his holdings represent each year. The table below shows his holdings on December 31 of each year as a benchmark for the corresponding year’s ETH holdings. His holdings on December 8, 2023, are also included, representing his most recent known ETH holdings.
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We can see that Buterin’s claim appears to be correct. His known ETH holdings have never significantly exceeded 0.9%. The highest year for his ETH holdings was in 2015, when he owned 0.91% of the total ETH supply. In fact, due to the increasing ETH supply from token sales and network inflation designed each year, his ETH holdings have decreased annually.
To assess the significance of Buterin’s ETH holdings, we can compare them to the holdings of other top ETH holders. It is easy to identify the entities holding the most ETH tokens by viewing the top holders section in Ethereum’s profile on Arkham.
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Who is the largest holder of Ethereum?
The table below shows the top 20 Ethereum holders ranked by entity as of the time of writing:
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The ETH 2 Deposit Smart Contract holds the highest number of tokens with 34,259,215.29, as validators must deposit their ETH tokens into the contract to participate in the validation process.
Coinbase and Binance rank second and third, respectively. Most of the entities ranking ahead of Buterin appear to be exchanges like Kraken and Robinhood, as well as institutional managers like Grayscale, which hold significant amounts of ETH for their operations. Exchanges hold a large amount of ETH for user withdrawals and token exchanges, while Grayscale’s ETH holdings reflect its investment in ETH tokens.
In fact, there is one individual who currently holds more ETH than Buterin, and that is Rain Lohmus, the founder of LHV Bank. He paid $75,000 in the ETH presale and owns 250,000 ETH. However, it is understood that he cannot access these tokens as he has forgotten the private key.
By examining Buterin’s portfolio file 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 31 of each year as a benchmark for the corresponding year’s holdings. The table also includes his estimated cryptocurrency net worth on November 18, 2021, when the price of ETH briefly reached its peak at $4,891. This represents the peak of Buterin’s known net worth.
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From December 31, 2015, to the present, Buterin’s net worth has increased over 900 times, from $596,760 to $55.122 billion. The highest percentage annual growth of his net worth occurred from $4.23 million on December 31, 2016, to $27.837 billion on December 31, 2017, during the 2017 bull market.
Buterin’s known cryptocurrency net worth is highly influenced by the fluctuation of the ETH price, as ETH constitutes over 99% of his investment portfolio. Therefore, whenever the price of ETH rises, Buterin’s net worth also increases, and vice versa when the price of ETH falls from historical highs.
In 2021, when the price of ETH surpassed $3,000, Buterin became a billionaire at the age of 27, and his known cryptocurrency net worth exceeded $1 billion. At the peak of the bull market on November 18, 2021, Buterin’s net worth briefly reached $2.09 billion as the price of ETH reached its all-time high of $4,891.
However, the crypto bear market hit again, and the price of ETH fell. By December 31, 2021, Buterin held $1.2 billion worth of ETH, and by December 31, 2022, his account was worth $300.58 million. Since then, his known cryptocurrency net worth has rebounded and reached $550 million at the time of writing, with the price of ETH at $2,234 (approximately $8.375 billion in total assets).
Another factor influencing the variation in his known cryptocurrency net worth is that his known ETH holdings seem to decrease each year. Buterin has been known to sell his ETH holdings multiple times.
For example, in May 2023, Buterin sent 200 ETH to a cryptocurrency exchange, and the Ethereum Foundation sold 15,000 ETH. It is worth noting that Buterin claims he has not sold ETH for personal profit since 2018. He further clarified that when he sends ETH to exchanges, it is for donation purposes rather than sale.
According to the data in Buterin’s portfolio file on Arkham, we can see his non-ETH holdings. As of the time of writing, some of his key non-ETH token holdings include:
1. 869,500 KNCL tokens (the token of the decentralized liquidity protocol Kyber Network), worth approximately $609,780.
2. 196.42 Wrapped Ether (WETH) tokens, worth approximately $436,920.
3. 101 million THE tokens, worth approximately $127,950.
While these are not Buterin’s main non-ETH holdings, the following tokens are also worth noting:
1. TORN tokens from Tornado.Cash worth $1,290. This is related to Vitalik’s involvement with the infamous mixer. His Arkham profile shows multiple transfers involving the use of Tornado Cash, including donations to Ukraine.
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2. 63.45 million SHIB tokens, worth $6.065 billion. In 2020, Vitalik received 50% of the token supply directly from its developers during the token’s release, briefly skyrocketing his known cryptocurrency net worth to approximately $10 billion.
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Buterin participated in the seed funding of StarkWare, a zero-knowledge proof technology developer. As of 2022, StarkWare’s valuation has reached $8 billion.
Due to the lack of publicly available information about his non-cryptocurrency assets, it is difficult to estimate the value of his non-cryptocurrency holdings and their impact on his overall net worth. However, we can speculate that if he still holds investments in StarkWare, the value of those investments would contribute to a portion of his net worth, as well as the value of any undisclosed investments.
Like Buterin, other Ethereum co-founders have also gained substantial financial benefits from their ETH holdings. In this section, we will compare Buterin’s estimated net worth to other Ethereum co-founders’ net worth.
For this section, we will consider his known cryptocurrency holdings (worth $800 million as of June 30, 2024) as the entirety or a significant portion of his net worth, as we cannot know the specific scale of his non-cryptocurrency holdings.
The following table shows the public estimated net worth of other co-founders (note: as the estimated net worth for some co-founders in 2023 is not necessarily available, some data comes from the last known available point, which may mark the peak of their net worth or significantly lower than the current situation):
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In conclusion, we have estimated the composition of Vitalik Buterin’s net worth and its fluctuations over time. Due to price increases, the majority of his current $860 million fortune comes from his holdings of Ethereum (ETH), which fluctuate with the price of Ethereum.
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