According to reports, Alexis Ohanian, one of the co-founders of the social media website Reddit, purchased 50,000 Ether (ETH) coins during the presale of the cryptocurrency in 2014 for only $15,000, which works out to a price of about 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 to be very appealing, in part due to his Armenian heritage. This led him to take an early gamble on Ethereum. Ohanian left the social media giant in 2020.

“Any group of people who have in their consciousness 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 one state very attractive.” [Citation needed] “Any group of people who have in their consciousness or in their collective history some idea of persecution, especially by a state.” And so, in some respects it was ingrained in me at the time, and this made me open to the concept of a decentralized currency in a manner.

According to CoinMarketCap, the value of this investment has skyrocketed to an astounding $82.5 million at today’s rates, marking a growth of 549,589% from its initial value.

He went on to describe how Turkish forces had taken the ancestral carpets that had been passed down through his family during the Armenian genocide that occurred during World War I. This is what sparked his interest in “unseizable property.”

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

Ohanian said that he recognized the possibility for developers to construct a broad variety of possibly unseizable assets on top of Ethereum when he first heard about it during a meeting with the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. Some examples of these types of assets include nonfungible tokens (NFTs).

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

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

Following Ohanian’s line of thinking that investors may take advantage of the opportunity to purchase assets at lower prices during a bear market, the company has seen the most recent market slump as the ideal moment to place long-term bets on the cryptocurrency business.

The company now has more than 750 million dollars’ worth of assets under management.

Ohanian made the observation that while cryptocurrencies are incredibly unpredictable, “there are enough of individuals who have the generational awareness of experiencing enormous inflation,” which makes the volatility of cryptocurrencies much more tolerable.

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