Reddit co-founder bought 50,000 Ether during presale, for $15K

The co-founder of social media site Reddit, Alexis Ohanian, reportedly bought 50,000 Ether (ETH) for just $15,000 during the cryptocurrency’s 2014 presale, a cost of just 30 cents per coin.

Ohanian, who left the social media giant in 2020, told Forbes in a Feb. 21 article that he found the idea of ​​a decentralized store of value very attractive, in part because of his Armenian heritage, which prompted him to make an early bet on Ethereum .

“Any group of people who in their consciousness, or in their collective history, have an idea of ​​persecution, especially by a state, makes the idea of ​​a store of value not controlled by any single state very attractive. And so, in some ways, it was hardwired into me then, and kind of made me receptive to the idea of ​​a decentralized currency.”

At current prices, this investment is worth a whopping $82.5 million according to CoinMarketCap, representing a 549,589% increase.

He went on to explain how his family’s inheritance of heirloom carpets was confiscated by Turkish soldiers during the Armenian Genocide in World War I, which led to his interest in “impregnable property”.

Because of his aversion to seizable property, Ohanian is a big proponent of self-storage and manages the private keys of some of his most valuable crypto-related investments to ensure they are kept away from exchanges that are more vulnerable to the prying arms of the government.

When he heard about Ethereum in a meeting with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, Ohanian claimed he saw the potential for developers to build a wide range of potentially useless assets like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on top of it.

As a result, he made his first investment in Ether, but noted in the interview that “in retrospect, I didn’t invest nearly as much as I should have.”

Related: Ethereum derivatives data suggests that $1,700 may not remain a resistance level for long

Ohanian founded venture capitalist firm 776 in 2020 using proceeds from his early investments in Ether and Coinbase, which has invested in 29 crypto-related startups and raised $500 million in February 2022 to fund similar investments.

In line with Ohanian’s view that bear markets provide investors with the opportunity to buy assets at discounted prices, the firm has seen the recent market downturn as the perfect time to bet long-term on the crypto industry.

The firm currently has over $750 million in assets under management.

Ohanian noted that while crypto is extremely volatile, “a lot of people have that generational awareness of seeing massive inflation,” making crypto’s volatility much more palatable to those people.