Britain’s Youngest Self-Made Bitcoin Billionaire Is Just 34
Ben Delo might just be proof that dreams do come true. The 34-year-old Oxford graduate who lives in Hong Kong is Britain’s youngest self-made Bitcoin billionaire having founded cryptocurrency exchange BitMex in 2014.
BitMex, which is the so-called zero-fee exchange and, at the press time, is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of the 24 hour trading volume, is now worth around USD 3.6 billion, according to the report by The Times. Now the company has three co-founders: Samuel Reed, Arthur Hayes and Delo himself.
According to the The Times, Delo is said to live frugally with his wife, said to emulate Warren Buffett, the legendary stock investor and long-time bitcoin skeptic, lifestyle-wise, and had worked 18-hour days to build his startup into a thriving trading platform. Not only does his frugal lifestyle imitate that of Buffett or even Bill Gates, a principal founder of the tech giant Microsoft, he also intends to give most of his wealth to philanthropic causes.
Delo had studied maths and computer science at Worcester College, Oxford and graduated in 2005 with a first-class degree. He first worked at the tech giant IBM as a software engineer and then moved to Hong Kong to work for the investment bank JP Morgan. He has over ten years experience developing high-frequency trading systems and his expertise covers the design, architecture and implementation of quantitative infrastructure, systems and tools.
Delo said that the beginnings for the company were so financially rough, that he had to rent out spare bedrooms on Airbnb and carved a small space out of his living room to make another one.
“I have had my nose down in a start-up for the past four years. I was doing 18-hour days at one point,” Delo told The Times.
Another of his co-founding colleagues, Arthur Hayes, remains bullish on Bitcoin: yesterday he told CNBC that, “We could definitely find a bottom in the USD 3,000 to USD 5,000 range. But we’re one positive regulatory decision away, aiming at ETF [exchange traded fund] approved by the SEC [the US Securities and Exchange Commission[, to climbing through USD 20,000 and even to USD 50,000 by the end of the year.” Bitcoin reaching up to USD 50,000 could make Britain’s youngest billionaire even richer.
