Tim Draper, the prominent venture capitalist and tech billionaire who purchased nearly 30,000 Bitcoins (BTC) that were seized from the Silk Road, has revealed his digital currency holdings span at least half a dozen different crypto assets.
Speaking at a recent investment conference, Draper revealed that his holdings include Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ripple (XRP), Tezos (XTZ), and Aragon (ANT), adding:
“I’m a believer. I think it’s happening – [adoption] it’s coming. It’s so important for the world, and I want the world to know it, and I want other people in the world to get on board.”
Draper’s comments come only three weeks after his Twitter account appeared to be subject to a hack to promote BCH. The suspicious tweet announced that the VC had purchased BCH, thanking a fake account impersonating Roger Ver for providing “this innovation”.
But the fact he does actually hold Bitcoin Cash casts a new light on the incident.
Draper has been an active cryptocurrency investor for seven years, having made multi-million investments into several startups and burgeoning projects, including major U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase. In 2019, he announced that he had moved entirely out of public stock in favour of cryptocurrency.
Draper has long been known to dabble in altcoins, having confirmed in 2017 that his fund participated in the Tezos ICO after a class-action lawsuit was filed against the project.
On a Quora forum in October 2019, the billionaire said that he thinks the DLT payments processor Ripple was doing all the right things, and is set for “explosive growth”, leading to much higher prices, adding:
“Looking at the three-time growth of Bitcoin over the last 5 months, one would expect a similar result from XRP.”
Which only goes to show that even billionaires aren’t very good at predicting prices.
Earlier this year, he revealed that Ethereum (ETH)-based project Aragon received a $1 million investment from him in return for 1 million ANT tokens, effectively giving him 2.52% of the token’s total supply.
His altcoin investments still appear to be dwarfed by his BTC holdings. In 2014 he purchased 30,000 BTC at the price of $632 per coin. This initial BTC investment has increased over 1,500% to the approximate value of $315 million.
Draper is also unlikely to sell anytime soon, as earlier this year he reconfirmed his 2018 predicted that the coin will rise past $250,000 within the next two years. If this occurs, his BTC holdings would hold a value of $7.5 billion.
