This story appears in the February 27, 2018 issue of Forbes. Subscribe
Cofounder, Ethereum; Founder of Jaxx and Decentral
Crypto Net Worth: $750 million-$1 billion*
"I got the concept of Bitcoin right away," says Anthony Di Iorio, 43, one of Ethereum's cofounders. Di Iorio, who went to Ryerson University in Toronto to study marketing, spent the 2000s managing his family's patio-door business as well as running a geothermal drilling firm. After watching the financial crisis decimate the real estate industry, Di Iorio found himself studying economics, trying to understand what had happened. "I was looking at alternative ways of thinking about economics, and I really started understanding learning about what money really is — that whole libertarian thinking about sound money."
In 2012, in search of fellow believers, he started the Toronto Bitcoin Meetup group — and at the first event he met Ethereum's founding genius, the Russian-Canadian coder Vitalik Buterin.
With a few hundred thousand from his prior enterprises, Di Iorio helped fund Ethereum's coding — and the legal counsel it hired--before the coin was taken public. Calling himself an "agnostic" when it comes to the various blockchains, he has since invested in a variety of crypto-assets, including Qtum, Vechain and Zcash. "I like being part of different sectors of the blockchain realm." His investment strategy has been to get in early and, after the asset grows and levels off, pour his gains into another new promising coin.
He's proud to have helped build Ethereum, now worth over $100 billion. "Now I go into a bank, and they're like, 'Oh my God, you started Ethereum,' whereas before they'd say, 'We can't give you a bank account.' Now they come to me."
*All cryptocurrency/U.S. dollar conversions are as of January 19, 2018.
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