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- Alexis Ohanian bought 50,000 ether for only $15,000 in 2014, he told Forbes.
- If the Reddit cofounder kept all of the coins, they would be worth about $80 million today.
- Ohanian made a total of $50 million from early bets on the crypto and Coinbase stock.
Alexis Ohanian bought 50,000 ether for only $15,000 in 2014 — and has made a combined $50 million from early bets on the cryptocurrency and Coinbase stock, he told Forbes in a recent interview.
When he first invested, the Reddit cofounder paid about 30 cents per ether coin. Ether — the native crypto of the ethereum platform, and the second-most valuable coin after bitcoin — now trades at around $1,600.
If Ohanian never sold any of his ether, it would have ballooned in value by 5,600 times to about $80 million today. If he had managed to cash out when ether peaked above $4,600 in November 2021, he would have pocketed upward of $230 million.
"In hindsight, I didn't invest nearly as much as I should have," Ohanian told Forbes.
Ohanian previously ran a venture firm named Initialized Capital, which invested in Coinbase before it went public in 2021. He cashed in $26 million of the crypto exchange stock's to help finance his current venture firm, 776.
The social-media entrepreneur, who is married to tennis legend Serena Williams, has invested in 29 blockchain startups to date. He raised $500 million in February 2022 to fund similar bets, and tried to launch a $176 million crypto fund in August — but ended up raising only $6 million as investors soured on the industry.
"I got that timing wrong," Ohanian said.
Ohanian told Forbes that he owns at least 700 non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Their various perks include early access to a startup's metaverse, and ownership rights to real estate in Georgia and a Web3 domain registry.
Moreover, in 2021, Ohanian spent over $500,000 worth of ether at today's prices on seven NFTs that he thought looked like Williams, and gifted his favorite one to her.
Ohanian didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.
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