Skype Co-Founder Keeps His Wealth In BTC And ETH: Report

The Skype Co-Founder Jaan Tallin who is an Estonian engineer who is known to support A.I. research and awareness efforts chose to keep his wealth in Bitcoin and Ethereum as we are reading more in our latest cryptocurrency news.

Jaan Tallinn, the Skype co-Founder holds most of his wealth in crypto. The Estonian engineer donated 350 ETH and 50 BTC to a UK-based firm Faculty AI in 2018 and 2020 while the company still holds on to most of the crypto that is received from Tallinn. The Estonian Engineer who was one of the founders of Skype is holding most of his personal wealth in crypto and he has been doing it for a while now according to an article by Fortune. Since Skype was sold to eBay for $2.6 billion back in 2005, Tallinn didn’t launch more companies but he invested in a lot. One of them was Faculty AI, which is a London-based company that is mostly focused on machine-learning systems that received digital assets from the co-founder on two occasions.

His investment company Metaplanet Holdings backed the faculty and now holds about 9% of its shares, and the co-founder even gifted the UK company with thousands of dollars in crypto. Tallinn gave 350 Ethereum while in March this year, he followed up with a 50 Bitcoin gift that was worth $316,000 according to the Faculty’s public financial filings. This amount, however, surged to over $810,000 during the recent BTC rally.

Since he holds most of his wealth in crypto, he said that it is much easier to invest this way. Selling the coins for cash will incur taxes and will reduce the amount of money that he is able to donate. The transfer proved to be trickier however for the UK company since traditional bookkeeping is not up o speed with the evolving world of crypto assets. Faculty’s founder Marc Warner said:

 “Our accountants had to go and find someone else who was working on crypto and how to do accounting for crypto.”

Since then, the company sold about $144,000 worth of ETH in one year but held onto most of the assets that it received from Tallin. While ETH is far away from its late 2017 and 2018 highs, Bitcoin’s price is getting back there.