Alexis Ohanian, one of the co-founders of social networking website Reddit, reportedly bought 50,000 Ether (ETH) coins during the cryptocurrency’s pre-sale in 2014 for just $15,000, which equates to a price of around $30. cents per coin.

Ohanian, who had left the social media giant in 2020, stated in an interview with Forbes on February 21 that he found the concept of a decentralized store of value very attractive, in part due to his Armenian heritage. This led him to bet early on Ethereal. Ohanian left the social media giant in 2020.

“Any group of people that has in their conscience or in their collective history some idea of ​​persecution, especially by a state, makes the idea of ​​a store of value that is not controlled by any state very attractive.” [Citation needed] “Any group of people who have in their conscience or in their collective history some idea of ​​persecution, especially by a state.” And so in some ways it was ingrained in me at the time, and this opened me up to the concept of a decentralized currency in a way.

According to CoinMarketCap, the value of this investment has skyrocketed to a staggering $82.5 million at current exchange rates, marking a growth of 549,589% from its initial value.

He went on to describe how Turkish forces had seized ancestral rugs that had been passed down through his family during the Armenian Genocide that occurred during World War I. This was what aroused his interest in “unattachable property.”

Ohanian is a strong supporter of self-custody, perhaps as a result of his disgust at the seizure of his property. He keeps some of his most valuable crypto assets off exchanges, making them less susceptible to the prying eyes of governments. He is in charge of managing the secret keys of these investments.

Ohanian said he recognized the potential for developers to build a wide variety of potentially unseizable assets on top of Ethereum when he first learned about it during a meeting with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. Some examples of this type of asset include non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

As a direct consequence of this, he made his first investment in Ether; however, he later said in an interview that “in retrospect, I didn’t invest as much as I should.”

Ohanian used the money he made from his early investments in Ether and Coinbase to launch his own venture capital firm, which he calls 776, in 2020. The firm has financial stakes in 29 cryptocurrency-related companies and, as of February of 2022, it successfully secured $500 million to fund more investments of a similar type.

Following Ohanian’s line of thinking that investors can seize the opportunity to buy assets at lower prices during a bear market, the company has seen the most recent market decline as the ideal time to place long-term bets on the business. of cryptocurrencies.

The company now has more than $750 million in assets under management.

Ohanian made the observation that while cryptocurrencies are incredibly unpredictable, “there are enough people who have a generational awareness of experiencing huge inflation,” making cryptocurrency volatility much more tolerable.