The richest crypto billionaire in the world as of November 2026 is Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder, with an estimated net worth of about $115 billion. This ranking covers people whose fortunes were built mainly by founding, running or owning a cryptocurrency business: exchanges, stablecoin issuers, blockchains and bitcoin treasury companies. Four of the top five share one company, and it is a firm most people only know by its ticker.
| Rank | Name | Net worth (USD) | Main source of wealth |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | Jed McCaleb | $3.9 billion | Ripple and Stellar cofounder, XRP sales |
| 9 | Michael Saylor | $4.3 billion | Strategy stake, personal bitcoin |
| 8 | Brian Armstrong | $7 billion | Coinbase |
| 7 | Chris Larsen | $8.4 billion | Ripple, XRP |
| 6 | Justin Sun | $8.5 billion | Tron, HTX, crypto holdings |
| 5 | Stuart Hoegner | $25 billion | Tether |
| 4 | Jean-Louis van der Velde | $35 billion | Tether, Bitfinex |
| 3 | Paolo Ardoino | $38 billion | Tether |
| 2 | Giancarlo Devasini | $89 billion | Tether, Bitfinex |
| 1 | Changpeng Zhao | $115 billion | Binance, BNB |
10. Jed McCaleb: $3.9 billion
Jed McCaleb has founded more crypto projects than most people have heard of. He built Mt. Gox as a trading site for a card game before turning it into a bitcoin exchange, then cofounded Ripple in 2012 and walked away with roughly 9 billion XRP.
He spent close to a decade selling those coins on a schedule and sold the last of them in 2022. He also created the Stellar network, and today most of his attention goes to Vast, a private space station company he started in 2021 and has largely paid for himself. Few people turn a token allowance into a space program.
Our figure leans on estimates of his cumulative XRP proceeds, adjusted for what he has spent on Vast.
9. Michael Saylor: $4.3 billion
Michael Saylor ran a business software company for three decades before he discovered bitcoin in 2020. Then he went all in. MicroStrategy, now renamed Strategy, began buying bitcoin with its cash pile, then with borrowed money, and by 2026 held more than 800,000 coins.
Saylor also bought 17,732 bitcoin for himself in 2020, paying about $175 million. He says he has never sold a single one. In the summer of 2026 Strategy sold a few thousand coins below its average cost to fund dividends and buybacks, its first real sales since 2022. Saylor remains executive chairman and the most recognizable voice of the bitcoin treasury trade.
We added his Strategy shares at the November 2026 market price to his personal bitcoin stack.
8. Brian Armstrong: $7 billion
Brian Armstrong was an engineer at Airbnb when he started writing code for a bitcoin wallet on the side. That side project became Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the United States, and in 2021 it listed directly on the Nasdaq.
Armstrong still owns about 17% of the company and runs it as CEO. Coinbase has spent the last two years acting less like an exchange and more like crypto’s bank: custody for ETFs, the Base blockchain and a share of the revenue from the USDC stablecoin. Its share price swings with bitcoin, which is why his fortune can move by a billion dollars in a bad week.
The estimate is his Coinbase stake priced at the market in November 2026, plus cash from earlier share sales.
7. Chris Larsen: $8.4 billion
Chris Larsen had already built and sold two fintech companies before Ripple. E-Loan was one of the first online mortgage lenders, and Prosper helped invent peer-to-peer lending. In 2012 he cofounded Ripple to move money between banks faster.
He stepped down as CEO in 2016 but is still executive chairman, and Ripple has spent about $3 billion on acquisitions to become a full crypto infrastructure company. Larsen also cofounded Rippleworks, a foundation that backs social enterprises in developing countries. Most of his personal wealth sits in XRP and Ripple equity, both of which are volatile.
We built this from his estimated XRP holdings at November 2026 prices and his stake in Ripple.
6. Justin Sun: $8.5 billion
Justin Sun is 36 and has been one of crypto’s loudest promoters for most of his adult life. He founded the Tron blockchain in 2017, bought BitTorrent the following year and later took control of the exchanges Poloniex and HTX.
Tron turned out to have one killer use: moving USDT cheaply. A huge share of the world’s Tether transfers run on it, which keeps fees flowing to the network. Sun also holds large positions in bitcoin, Tron’s own TRX token and a long list of smaller coins, and he is famous for buying a banana artwork taped to a wall for $6.2 million in 2024 and then eating it.
His number reflects TRX, bitcoin and other tokens we can attribute to him, plus the value of his exchange interests.
5. Stuart Hoegner: $25 billion
Stuart Hoegner is the least famous person in this top five, and he is the lawyer. A Canadian attorney with a background in gaming and gambling law, he became general counsel for Tether and Bitfinex in the company’s early days and took equity along the way.
That stake is estimated at about 13% of Tether. Tether issued about $185 billion of USDT by mid-2026 and invests the money backing those tokens in Treasury bills, gold and bitcoin. The interest alone produced about $13 billion of profit in 2024 and about $10 billion in 2025. Few corporate lawyers have ever owned a slice of something that profitable.
Our model values his roughly 12% to 13% share at a Tether valuation of about $200 billion, a conservative private-market estimate. Secondary trades in 2026 pointed higher, but Tether is not listed and no figure is official.
4. Jean-Louis van der Velde: $35 billion
Jean-Louis van der Velde is the richest person in the Netherlands, and almost nobody there could pick him out of a lineup. He spent years doing business in Asia before becoming CEO of Bitfinex and then of Tether, a job he held until Paolo Ardoino took over in 2023.
His stake is thought to be around 15% to 20% of Tether, and estimates of his wealth are the most scattered of anyone here. The October 2026 Dutch rich list put him at about €26 billion, while other trackers range from $16 billion to $38 billion. We land near the middle and hedge accordingly.
The figure takes a stake of 15% to 20% at a Tether value of about $200 billion and discounts it for the uncertainty over his exact share.
3. Paolo Ardoino: $38 billion
Paolo Ardoino started coding at age eight in a small town on the Italian Riviera. He studied computer science in Genoa, worked on cybersecurity and at a hedge fund, then joined Bitfinex in 2014 as a developer. He became Tether’s CTO in 2017 and its CEO in late 2023.
Under Ardoino, Tether has started acting like a sovereign wealth fund with a stablecoin attached. It built an 11.5% stake in Juventus, made a roughly €1.1 billion cash offer for control of the football club in November 2025, led a funding round of up to $1.4 billion in the German robot maker Neura Robotics in 2026 and launched its own on-device AI platform. Ardoino is the public face for all of it.
His estimated 20% of Tether, valued at about $200 billion, gives us the $38 billion.
2. Giancarlo Devasini: $89 billion
Giancarlo Devasini graduated from medical school in Milan in 1990 and worked as a cosmetic surgeon for about two years. He then left medicine, sold computer parts and ran a string of small businesses, some of which failed. In 2012 he helped found Bitfinex, where he is still CFO.
Tether grew out of Bitfinex, and Devasini is believed to own about 45% of it, by far the largest stake. Tether has never confirmed its ownership split, so every figure here rests on outside estimates. He was named Tether’s chairman in 2025. That share makes him the richest person in Italy, ahead of the families behind Ferrero and the Del Vecchio eyewear fortune, and one of the 25 richest people on the planet. If Tether ever reaches the $350 billion to $500 billion valuation it has discussed with investors, his number could pass $150 billion.
We value his roughly 45% stake at about $200 billion for Tether, in line with how investors priced it in 2026.
1. Changpeng Zhao: $115 billion
Changpeng Zhao, known everywhere as CZ, was born in Jiangsu in 1977 and grew up partly in Canada, where he flipped burgers at McDonald’s as a teenager. He wrote trading software in Tokyo and New York, worked briefly at Blockchain.info and OKCoin, then launched Binance in July 2017. Within months it was the busiest crypto exchange in the world.
Zhao is estimated to still own about 90% of Binance, plus a large pile of its BNB token. He no longer runs the exchange day to day, after handing the CEO role to Richard Teng in 2023, and he now lives in Abu Dhabi. In April 2026 he published a memoir, Freedom of Money. Binance still handles a large share of global crypto trading, which is why his fortune keeps climbing even when bitcoin does not. CZ himself has publicly said the highest estimates of his wealth look too generous, and other trackers put him at less than half this figure, so treat it as the top of a wide range.
Our total combines a 90% Binance stake, valued on exchange earnings, with his BNB holdings at November 2026 prices.
What the richest crypto billionaires have in common
- The infrastructure beats the coin. Seven of the ten got rich by owning the pipes (an exchange, a stablecoin issuer, a payments network) and collecting a toll on every trade or transfer. Only Saylor made his fortune mainly by betting on bitcoin’s price.
- Tether is the most profitable small company in finance. Four people on this list share a firm with a famously small staff that earned more than $10 billion a year, simply by holding Treasury bills behind a digital dollar.
- Most were early, few were young. Only one of the ten is under 40. Crypto rewarded people who arrived between 2012 and 2017 with prior careers in medicine, law, trading software and fintech, then stayed through three crashes.
- Private stakes make the numbers soft. Binance and Tether are not listed, so every estimate for the top five depends on an assumed valuation. A single funding round could move the top of this list by tens of billions.
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Who is the richest crypto billionaire in 2026?
Changpeng Zhao, founder of Binance, is the richest crypto billionaire with an estimated net worth of about $115 billion as of November 2026. Most of it comes from his roughly 90% stake in Binance and his BNB tokens.
How much money do you need to make this list?
Jed McCaleb is number 10 with about $3.9 billion. The Winklevoss twins, at roughly $2.8 billion each, just miss out.
Why are so many Tether executives on the list?
Tether issues USDT, the largest stablecoin, and earns interest on the reserves backing it. With profits of about $10 billion to $13 billion a year and a valuation near $200 billion, its four main owners are all multibillionaires.
Who is the youngest crypto billionaire in the top 10?
Justin Sun, the founder of Tron, is 36. Paolo Ardoino, Tether’s CEO, is next at 42.
Is Vitalik Buterin a billionaire?
Vitalik Buterin, who cofounded Ethereum, has been a paper billionaire when ether prices peaked, but he has given away large amounts of ETH and his holdings sit well below the cutoff for this ranking.
How do crypto billionaires make their money?
Mostly through ownership of exchanges, stablecoin issuers and blockchains, which earn fees and interest regardless of which way prices move. Holding the coins themselves is a smaller part of most of these fortunes.
How we estimate net worth
Our estimates are based on public reporting, company valuations, and deal and earnings figures all compiled in an internal valuation model. They are approximate, and figures change over time as new information emerges.
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Last updated: November 2026.
