Brian Armstrong became one of the richest people in the world after Coinbase Global Inc. went public on Wednesday.
Coinbase, co-founded by Mr. Armstrong in 2012, runs the largest bitcoin exchange in the United States and was the first major cryptocurrency company to go public in the country. At the start of trading, it had a valuation of over $ 100 billion, which would make Mr. Armstrong’s 20% share worth about $ 20 billion. This places the 38-year-old CEO among the 100 richest people in the world, based on the list of Forbes billionaires.
However, Mr. Armstrong remains largely unknown outside the cryptographic circles and is somewhat of an enigma within them. He is not the founder or crypto evangelist of Silicon Valley. He rarely speaks in the press and attends several conferences. His Twitter account is, by the standards of that platform, unusually quiet.
What propels it, said a number of people who have worked with it, is a firm focus on bringing bitcoin en masse.
Mr. Armstrong was an early fan of Introduced in 2008 by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin was conceived as a digital version of cash.