Photo: Financial Express
Last month, the crypto market crashing may have instilled fear among new or inexperienced investors, but long-time investors and experts were accustomed to such events; however, the downturn proved to be heavier, losing nearly $2 trillion in value. The heavy loss affected everyone, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
The crypto market crash made waves in the digital space, with many announcing their losses. Billionaires were no exception, as many posted on social media about how they suffered during the steep crash due to selloffs in Terra UST and the collapse of sister token LUNA. Buterin also took to the social media platform Twitter to say he is no longer a billionaire.
On May 20, the Ethereum co-founder tweeted, “I’m not a billionaire anymore.”
Ethereum is the second-largest cryptocurrency in the market behind Bitcoin and has been typically used to acquire Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs. No one anticipated the magnitude of the crash, but the two crypto assets witnessed a massive correction in their market price.
On Sunday, the cryptocurrency traded over $2,015, currently up by 2.4%. As of the moment, it has a market cap of $243.5 billion, making up 15% of the crypto market. However, the volume trading in Ether was revealed to be down by more than 32.4% today. The last seven days saw Ether plunge by over 3%, while it fell over 33% in a month. In November last year, the cryptocurrency nosedived by nearly 59% compared to its all-time high.
On November 16, 2021, Ether hit an all-time high of $4,891.70. Fast-forward to today, and it is not even half the price level. At the time, Buterin was reported to have holdings worth $1.5 billion in Ether, but the six months that followed witnessed Ether take a steeper correction.
Other billionaires shared their opinions of the Terra sisters’ fall with Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, or CZ tweeted that he was poor again. Michael Novogratz, the founder of the crypto merchant bank Galaxy Inc, acknowledged that Terra UST and LUNA were big ideas that failed.
“There is no good news in what happened in markets or to the Terra ecosystem,” he wrote in a letter to shareholders, friends, partners, and the crypto community. “In Luna and UST alone, $40 billion of market value was destroyed in a very short amount of time. Both large and small investors saw profits and wealth vanish.”
