SAN FRANCISCO — The creators of the famous Forbes rich list have made their first attempt to identify the wealthiest people in the virtual currency industry. Yet the list that was published on Wednesday, right after major drops in virtual currency prices, inadvertently also served as a reminder of the fleeting nature of that wealth.
While the list in Forbes magazine, which was assembled in recent weeks, identifies about 10 virtual currency billionaires, most of them were not billionaires by the time the feature went online on Wednesday morning. On Monday alone, the prices of many virtual currencies plummeted over 20 percent, before stabilizing on Tuesday.
At the top of the list is Chris Larsen, a founder of the Ripple virtual currency. Mr. Larsen was briefly estimated to be wealthier than Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg last month when Ripple’s price peaked, taking his net wealth to nearly $60 billion.
Since then, the price of Ripple’s digital token, XRP, has fallen more than 80 percent. Forbes put Mr. Larsen’s wealth at around $8 billion, but the same holdings were worth less than $6 billion by Wednesday.
Mr. Larsen is followed on the Forbes list by Joseph Lubin, an early investor in the Ethereum virtual currency network; Changpeng Zhao, founder of the virtual currency exchange Binance; the brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, longtime Bitcoin investors who are famous from their legal battles with Mr. Zuckerberg over Facebook; and Matthew Mellon, the banking heir who is now a major holder of XRP.
The list is a reminder of how the biggest gains in virtual currencies have been reaped by a small number of early adopters — despite the early promises that virtual currencies could democratize the financial system and spread wealth more evenly.
Nearly all of the people on the list either helped found virtual currencies or have been involved with them for years. Recent efforts to quantify the inequality among Bitcoin holders have found that it is significantly higher than in even the most stratified countries, which may sting many people…
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