An anonymous cryptocurrency trader who goes by the username of 0x00A651D43B6e209F5Ada45A35F92EFC0De3A5184 just flipped $55 million of paper money into $283 million in a little over a month of online trading. Due to the secretive nature of the cryptocurrency world, the internet only found out about this incredible fact because the user bragged about their 413 percent profit on a June 11 Instagram in Indonesian.
As Bloomberg reports, the now-deleted Instagram post was of a series of photos that "purported to be the hardware powering a mini operation but looked lifted from another website." The caption read: "I get many private messages asking how much ether I have. One of the cool things about Ethereum is that all wallets around the world are transparent and open for everyone to see. And this is my wallet’s savings."
According to BroBible, the user’s current balance in their virtual wallet is a cool $147,396,802.36. That amount means they either withdrew some of their earnings, or possibly lost some. Either way, we'd gladly trade for their account.
This trader is working with digital money from the Ethereum blockchain, which is a newer kind of cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin. Unlike Bitcoin, though, Ethereum is based on a blockchain platform, which means the technology can also be used to store smart contracts, says Huffington Post. BroBible has a handy flowchart explaining what Ethereum is and how it can be used to make money.
A blockchain is a decentralized online system that can record transactions with a heightened sense of security and transparency, which is why it is such a popular place to work with these large sums of cryptocurrency. For Ethereum, the entire system is governed by ether, which is what the currency on the blockchain is called. According to Bloomberg, "JPMorgan Chase & Co., BP Plc, Microsoft Corp. and ING Groep NV are among" the companies already using Ethereum in some capacity.
The total value of Ethereum is currently set at $23 billion, which means that although this particular anonymous trader has made a whopping amount of money in an incredibly short amount of time, there are likely plenty of other very rich people laughing all the way to the bank as they thank the software for their fat wallets.
Take, for example, 23-year-old Vitalik Buterin, the Russian-Canadian creator of Ethereum. In a Reddit post last month, he admitted to owning ether equivalent to $117 million.
