- Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance has lost $70 billion this year.
- The value of Binance and cryptocurrencies have declined sharply this year.
Many cryptocurrency billionaires who flourished during the Covid-19 pandemic are having a bad year as the value of their holdings drop. In total, the market cap of all cryptocurrencies has dropped to about $1.8 trillion, which is lower than their all-time high. Changpeng Zhao has become the worst-performing billionaire this year.
Changpeng Zhao net worth
Changpeng Zhao, the Canadian computer scientist who founded Binance, had one of the fastest rise to $100 billion status. A his peak, the value of all his assets was estimated to be over $100 billion, making him one of the 10 biggest people in the world. This was a notable thing considering that he started Binance only in 2017.
Now, the CZ net worth has collapsed to about $26.2 billion, meaning that he has seen his paper wealth crash by $69.7 billion. This makes him the worst-performing billionaire in the world this year according to data compiled by Bloomberg. On the other hand, Forbes estimates that he is worth $65 billion.
Other well-known billionaires are not doing good as well. For example, Jeff Bezos has lost $44 billion as the value of his Amazon stake has plummeted. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, has seen his net worth collapse by $12.8 billion while Bernand Arnaut has lost $46 billion. On the other hand, India’s Gautam Adani has added $45.7 billion.
Calculating CZ net worth
Changpeng’s net worth is a bit difficult to estimate because Binance is a privately owned company. Therefore, one needs to use several assumptions, such as the performance of Coinbase, the biggest publicly-traded cryptocurrency exchange.
Coinbase stock price has collapsed by more than 58% in the past 12 months, bringing its total market cap to about $27 billion. Therefore, the assumption is that Binance has also lost an equivalent value since the two companies are relatively similar. At its peak, Binance was valued at about $300 billion and Zhao owns about 90% of the firm.
Changpeng Zhao has also invested in specific cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Binance Coin. The estimation by Bloomberg excludes these assets. Still, the two coins have also tumbled by double digits from their highest levels this year. Bitcoin has dropped by 20% while BNB Coin has fallen by over 22% in the same period. Still, it is worth noting that Binance has disputed the estimates by Bloomberg.
