In less than a week, the cryptocurrency billionaire
The CFTC has just filed a lawsuit against Zhao and his firm Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, for allegedly letting U.S. residents buy and sell crypto derivatives while the firm is not registered.
The man with the most to lose is Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, crypto's largest exchange, a sprawling global network of murky subsidiaries. CZ, as he's known, has an estimated 70% stake in Binance, which Forbes' values at $4.5 billion–down from $65 billion in March.
FTX. The Bahamas-based exchange shocked the crypto world by going bankrupt in November after suffering withdrawals of about $6 billion in just 72 hours and rival crypto exchange Binance ditched a possible rescue.
The firm is not the only investor to have lost eye-watering amounts of money since Mr Bankman-Fried's $32bn empire collapsed. FTX had an estimated 1.2 million registered users who were using the exchange to buy cryptocurrency tokens such as Bitcoin and thousands of others.
The three notable crypto luminaries who died within a few weeks of one another were Nikolai Mushegian, 29, Tiantian Kullander, 30, and Vyacheslav Taran, 53. Crypto has been in the headlines due to the fall of FTX, which has increased the amount of attention given to crypto-cyber news.
Nikolai Mushegian, age 29, Tiantian Kullander, 30, and Vyacheslav Taran, age 53, were three outstanding crypto luminaries who passed away within a matter of weeks of each other, as reported by KCEN TV.
Luna, the cryptocurrency associated with TerraUSD, or UST, is now worth $0 as the stablecoin has dramatically lost its $1 peg. The Terra network stopped processing transactions twice in 24 hours. Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, temporarily delisted UST and luna.
Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao (commonly known as CZ) was the crypto billionaire who lost the most money following the crypto crisis of 2022, with a net worth drop amounting to 82 billion U.S. dollars.
The biggest loser (in dollar terms) is Sam Bankman-Fried, the 29-year-old founder of quantitative crypto trading firm Alameda Research. A former Wall Street trader, Bankman-Fried was worth $16.7 billion at Bitcoin's peak on May 10, but is now down to $11.5 billion as of Wednesday afternoon.
Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein's world of TED talk-style speeches and music videos collapsed around them when they were arrested over stolen Bitcoin worth $4.5 billion.
Bitcoin (BTCUSD), Ethereum (ETHUSD) Price Drop, Wiped Off $200 Billion in a Day - Bloomberg.
“I like investing in things that have valuable output. The value of companies is based on how they make great products. The value of crypto is just what some other person decides someone else will pay for it so not adding to society like other investments,” he said.
Cryptocurrency has two kingpins. Forbes' 2018 ranking of the world's billionaires includes only a couple people who accumulated their vast fortunes from digital assets: Chris Larsen and Changpeng Zhao.
Mark Cuban
In an email to Forbes two years ago, he wrote that Bitcoin is “too difficult to use, too easy to hack, way too easy to lose, too hard to understand, too hard to assess a value.” He added that he'd “rather have bananas, I can eat bananas.”
Curt Dell, a father of three from California, told ABC News' Rebecca Jarvis that he's lost over $200,000 in Bitcoin after the digital crypto lending company Celsius went bankrupt last year.
The Luna crypto network collapsed in what's considered the largest crypto crash ever, with an estimated $60 billion wipeout, shaking the global digital currency market.
The finance world has been rocked by the sudden and unexpected death of a young crypto founder at the age of just 30.
In April, Bob Lee, the creator of Cash App and former technology chief at Square, was stabbed to death in San Francisco. Last June, Mircea Popescu, a controversial Bitcoin billionaire, drowned in Costa Rica. Some speculate that their crypto fortunes may be lost forever without access to their private keys.
Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym for the person or people who helped develop the first bitcoin software and introduced the concept of cryptocurrency to the world in a 2008 paper.