By
Bhushan Akolkar
April 16th, 2024
Jaan Tallinn noted that the reason for donating in Bitcoin and Ethereum is the fact that it is much easier to send digital assets.
Estonian investor and Skype Co-founder Jaan Tallinn has most of his wealth in digital assets: Bitcoin and Ethereum. This is according to a post on media outlet Fortune that highlighted that the Estonian computer programmer donated 350 units of Ethereum and 50 Bitcoins in the past few years to a London-based company called Faculty AI. Apparently, according to the post by Fortune, the UK based startup still holds most of the cryptocurrency donated by Tallinn.
With Bitcoin trading over $16 k in the past few days and Ethereum slightly above $450, the donation is almost one million dollars in value.
Tallinn noted that the reason for donating in Bitcoin and Ethereum is the fact that it is much easier to send in digital assets and, moreover, as he already had cryptos, converting them to fiat would have lead to an unnecessary capital gains tax bill.
This makes Tallinn’s investment in the company more valuable if his share value was based on the cryptocurrency donated over time.
Bitcoin and Ethereum Endorsement by Skype Co-founder
Faculty AI is a company striving to tap on emerging technologies to make human life easier through artificial intelligence. It is reported that the company won an $800,000 contract from the UK Home Office to build an A.I. system that could detect terrorist propaganda on social media platforms.
With Tallinn’s investment in cryptocurrency, his net worth is bound to skyrocket if the value of Bitcoin and Ethereum continue rising exponentially.
As of 2019, his net worth was estimated to be at $900 million, however, if his cash was in Bitcoin and Ethereum, his net worth is now around $1 billion.
Tallinn is widely involved in artificial intelligence in relation to human existence and how to mitigate dangers that might wipe out humanity as a species. As a result, he co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University as well as the Future of Life Institute in Massachusetts.
In 2020, high net worth individuals and institutional investors are turning to digital assets for investment. This is supported by the exponential growth rate in assets under management at Grayscale over the past few quarters.
In addition, PayPal Holdings Inc (NASDAQ: PYPL) recently announced it will support cryptocurrency features in its platform. All these fundamentals added up together makes digital assets not only a good safe haven but also the best investment.
Bitcoin was trading around $16,300 at the time of writing, which is very close to the all-time high attained in the 2017 bull rally.