Charlie Lee Net Worth: How Rich Is Litecoin Founder?
Litecoin founder Charlie Lee has an estimated net worth of more than $300 million. This includes an estimated amount of Litecoin he sold in 2017 when LTC was trading near its all-time high. However, Lee’s actual net worth could be considerably higher or lower since he never revealed exactly how much LTC he sold, but gave only a rough estimate.
Who is Charlie Lee?
Inspired by the release of Bitcoin in 2009, Charlie Lee founded Litecoin in 2011, during which time he worked as a software engineer at Google.
Born in 1977 in Ivory Coast, Charlie Lee is a computer scientist and the founder of Litecoin. Lee moved to the United States in 1980 and went on to receive a Bachelor of Science (in 1999) and a Master of Engineering (in 2000) in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
After finishing his education, he spent years working at a number of tech companies in California (Kana Communications and Guidewire Software) between 2000 and 2007. In 2007, he started working at Google, spending his time on products like YouTube Mobile, Chrome OS, and Play Games.
During his tenure at Google, inspired by the launch of Bitcoin in 2009, Lee released Litecoin in October 2011. He never saw Litecoin as a competitor to Bitcoin, but rather “as silver to Bitcoin’s gold.” In 2013, two years after the release of Litecoin, he left Google to become an Engineering Manager at Coinbase, a position that allowed him to work more closely with cryptocurrencies. By 2017, he left Coinbase to work on Litecoin full-time. Currently, he serves as the managing director of the Litecoin Foundation.
What is Charlie Lee’s net worth in 2023?
Most of Charlie Lee’s net worth reportedly comes from the Litecoin he sold in 2017, which could be worth more than $300 million. It is worth noting that Lee sold his LTC very close to the 2017 top of $373.
In a post made on Reddit on December 20, 2017, Lee stated he had sold all his LTC, arguing that his involvement with LTC and his comments in the social media space about Litecoin constitute a clear “conflict of interest”:
“For this reason, in the past days, I have sold/donated all my LTC. Litecoin has been very good for me financially, so I am well off enough that I no longer need to tie my financial success to Litecoin’s success. For the first time in 6+ years, I no longer own a single LTC that’s not stored in a physical Litecoin.”
The Litecoin founder never revealed how many coins he sold exactly – he only stated that the amount he sold “was a small percentage of GDAX’s daily volume and it did not crash the market.”
While not much, this does give us a hint of what Lee’s position might have been. Firstly, we know that his LTC position was a small percentage of GDAX’s (later rebranded as Coinbase Pro) Litecoin trading volume. Secondly, we know that Lee sold his coins over the span of several days before December 20, 2017.
Over $3.4 billion worth of Litecoin was traded on GDAX in the week Lee announced he sold his LTC, giving us a hint of how big his Litecoin position might have been. Source: Cryptowatch
Drawing from this info, we dove into historical trading data from Coinbase for the LTC/USD pair in the seven days prior to December 20, 2017. What we found was that 10,473,900 LTC was traded on the exchange between December 13 and December 19, 2017, at an average LTC price of $332. The total trading volume amounted to roughly $3.48 billion.
Now comes the question of how much is the “small percentage” Lee talked about. If his stake represented 1% of LTC/USD trading volume on GDAX, then he received $34.8 million by selling his Liteocin.
However, we believe it’s far more likely that Charlie Lee’s stake was closer to 10% of the entire weekly trading volume (about 1 million LTC, worth $347 million at the time) – small enough not to crash the markets and a very reasonable amount for someone like the project’s founder.
For additional context, Litecoin’s total supply is capped at 84 million LTC, or four times the amount of coins as is the case with Bitcoin. A wallet widely believed to belong to Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto houses about 1 million BTC, or roughly 5% of the coin’s entire supply. Judging from this, it’s very reasonable to expect that Lee mined 1 million LTC, or about 1.25% of Litecoin’s total supply. This makes the $300 million+ net worth estimate all the more likely.
The bottom line: Charlie Lee is among the richest people in the crypto space
Charlie Lee has an estimated net worth of a couple hundred million dollars, but that accounts only for his Litecoin stake – it is very much possible that Lee could have a much higher net worth, as he was in space since the early days of Bitcoin, and could very well hold coins other than Litecoin in his portfolio.
If you want to learn more about the net worth of other crypto personalities, check our articles on Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, former CEO of FTX Sam Bankman-Fried, and TRON founder Justin Sun.
If you want to learn more about the future prospects of Litecoin, and whether the currency might pull off a repeat of the pre-halving rally in 2019, check out the video below.
