Crypto brothers, entrepreneurs shoot up Rich List as bitcoin rises

Mr Zeng used his limited finances to buy bitcoin, at the time only several hundred dollars, vastly below the $US46,000 it was worth on Friday. He has held on to them ever since. He also is an equal shareholder in Caleb & Brown, alongside Prash Puspanathan and Rupert Hackett, and all three are on the Financial Review Young Rich List.

The approval of the ETF product this week has further enriched their business. “There has definitely been a spike,” Mr Zeng said. “Customer activity has basically doubled.”

The SEC approved 11 bitcoin exchange-traded funds on Thursday, now listed on major US markets, but the decision was long anticipated, helping to increase the bitcoin price since October.

Digital assets made a comeback last year, despite the prosecution of FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried and Binance chief executive Changpeng Zhao, two of the most prominent leaders in the industry and once some of the wealthiest people in the world.

Mr Zeng is far from alone in riding the wave of the comeback. Kain Warwick, the founder of crypto derivatives platform Synthetix, has increased his fortune from $274 million to $327 million between October to January 11 – when the ETFs were approved – according to valuation calculations made by the Financial Review Rich List. Mr Warwick confirmed the increase was accurate.

Synthetix introduced a way for people to lend their cryptocurrencies to others, who would then use them to help establish new blockchain products. His Synthetix token has increased in value by 113 per cent over the past 12 months.

Mr Warwick’s brothers are also involved in the cryptocurrency sector. Kieran, Aaron and Grant Warwick are the co-founders of crypto-based computer game Illuvium. They sustained heavy losses in early 2022 with the sell-off in crypto assets, and then lost hundreds of millions of dollars after a hacker drained funds from their video game treasury in February that year.

But now, Kieran Warwick’s wealth has increased by an estimated 47 per cent, from $68 million in October to $100 million in January, while Aaron Warwick’s rose from $59 million to $86 million. Grant Warwick’s wealth has risen from $31 million to $47 million, according to the Rich List estimate. Tokens from their blockchain-based game are up more than 90 per cent in the past year.

Another family, the Fergusons, are also likely winners of the crypto bull run. Robbie Ferguson joined the Young Rich List in 2022, at the age of 25. With his brother James, Robbie set up Immutable in late 2017, just as markets fell.

“Immutable was born into one of the biggest bear markets in crypto of all time,” Robbie Ferguson has previously said. The company runs a platform for publishing and developing video games and its own token, ImmutableX, is used on that service.

Rich List calculations show the Ferguson brothers have increased their respective wealth from as estimated $569 million to $769 million, a 35 per cent increase, based on a rise in equivalent companies. Immutable was valued at $3.5 billion in a funding round in 2022, but has been through troubles since then, including layoffs.

But Robbie Ferguson said the company had benefited from the recent rally. “Immutable has had a huge year of growth. We now have over 250 games building on the platform and are the clear market leader in web3 gaming.”

The former Macquarie bankers behind green bitcoin miner Iris Energy, Daniel and Will Roberts, saw their individual fortunes rise by 16 per cent, from $57 million to $66 million in the past three months, according to Rich List estimates. Iris shares have jumped 261 per cent in the past 12 months.

The Rich List calculations estimate entrepreneur Sergei Sergienko’s fortune has risen from $216 million in October to $247 million. Sergienko, who grew up in Chelyabinsk, a steel town in Russia, started Chrono.tech, a crypto-backed platform for freelancers.

Crypto-focused businesses have been inundated with new customers, Ting Wang, the co-founder of Brisbane’s Coinstash, said. “In the past 12 months, we signed up about 7000 to 8000 customers, a 30 per cent increase in our customer base.

Mr Wang started investing in bitcoin in 2015, when he used the currency for online gaming. “I’ve held on through the whole time – most of the portfolio is in bitcoin,” he said.

Brisbane-based Jeff Yew’s Monochrome Asset Management is in line to get a green light from the ASX in the first half of this year for an exchange-traded fund linked to the price of bitcoin.

Mr Yew said he first invested in bitcoin around 2014 after hearing about it on social media. “I always stuck with bitcoin as my primary investment thesis,” he said, adding he was always sure it was going to recover from intermittent price drops.

“I knew my conviction. I knew it was going to be volatile, [but] it’s digital gold.”