Nearly 30% of the world’s richest people invest in cryptocurrencies

A recent survey showed that about 30% of the richest people in the world invest in cryptocurrencies, either directly or indirectly. This is a much higher percentage than among investors who are not billionaires.

The data in question was collected by Forbes. The news outlet polled 65 of the world’s richest people to find out whether or not they invest in digital assets.

Billionaires invest in crypto

According to Forbes, among the billionaires who participated in the survey, 18% said they had at least 1% of their wealth in digital currencies.

Meanwhile, most seem to be just experimenting with crypto as a form of investment. That’s because the majority (80%) said they own less than a tenth of their wealth in crypto.

Meanwhile, 3.2% of billionaires surveyed claimed to have more than half of their fortunes in digital assets. Finally, around 10% said they do not invest directly in cryptocurrencies. Despite this, this group stated that it supports crypto-focused companies.

Sam Bankman-Fried

One of the billionaires interviewed by Forbes was Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX.

According to the news agency, he was one of the few billionaires who allowed their names to be revealed in the anonymous survey.

SBF reported that it holds between 76% and 100% of its net worth in cryptocurrencies. Bankman-Fried’s total net worth is estimated at around $20.6 billion.

Virtually all of the philanthropist executive’s wealth comes from his holdings in FTX and the FTT tokens he owns.

It is worth noting that although SBF is a 30-year-old billionaire in the crypto market, he has already stated that he will donate his entire fortune to charity.

He has even signed the Giving Pledge, to part with most of his money in support of philanthropic actions, either in life or in his will.

Mark Cuban

Another prominent billionaire investing in cryptocurrencies is Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. Although in the past he has rejected digital assets, even saying that he preferred bananas to BTC, he has “converted”.

Today, Cuban has a varied portfolio of BTC, ETH and NFTs. In addition, it publicly supports and promotes digital assets.

“It is no different than investing in stocks, bonds or other assets. Interest rates go up, risky assets go down,” Cuban told Forbes in an email Tuesday. “My tech stocks performed worse than my cryptocurrencies.”

Indirect investment in cryptocurrencies

While some billionaires put most of their fortunes into crypto directly, others do so indirectly.

This is the case of John Sobrato, billionaire in the real estate industry. He is said to have invested in one of Andreessen Horowitz’s funds, which has raised $4.5 billion for cryptocurrency companies and Web3.

According to him, this was the way he found to expose himself to the crypto market without having to “do his own due diligence on an asset class that we don’t understand,” said Sobrato.

As Columbia University Business School associate professor Omid Malekan has pointed out, billionaires are people primed to try out the new asset class. After all, they have the resources for it:

“I imagine one of the ways to become a billionaire is to be open-minded,” he told Forbes.

Meanwhile, there are billionaires skeptical of cryptocurrencies. The list includes, for example, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett; Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates; and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon.