Etienne vantKruys, The Crypto Investor Who Earned Every Penny
Etienne VantKruys, originally of Suriname, is the founder and CEO of Token Research Group Capital (TRGC), one of the world’s most effective digital asset funds. VantKruys founded the firm in 2016 to protect his existing crypto investments, as well as to further invest in the space by searching out active value opportunities. This led him to invest in a number of successful projects, including Kava, Akash, and Hathor.
About Etienne vantKruys
Location
Before entering the VC world and the crypto space, Etienne vantKruys worked as a basketball coach. Prior to this he had received an international master’s in coaching from the Johan Cruyff Institute for Sport Studies. He has also received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in educational sciences from Utrecht University. VantKruys was actually homeless during this time and slept at the Central Train Station in between his classes in order to remain at school. He dealt with similar hardships during his childhood, where he bounced around foster homes in Suriname before finally landing in an institution for disadvantaged children.
Remarkable Investments
Since founding TRGC, Etienne vantKruys and his colleagues have found themselves at the forefront of a number of important Web 3.0 and BlockChain developments. StaFi, one of vantKruys’s most recent projects, has been making headlines for the platform’s ability to unlock liquidity from staked assets. Another one of his recent ventures, Akash, has impressed users with its ability to host blockchain network components like nodes and DeFi apps on a decentralized cloud. Over a single round of funding in 2020, Akash raised more than $2 million.
Aside from his personal investments in crypto, vantKruys and TRGC’s most successful venture has been Ava Labs. The company operates the Avalanche multiverse and Ryval market under its umbrella. This groundbreaking system created an incentive program to help scale Web 3.0 and accelerate the adoption of novel Subnets. After securing a Series A funding amount of $6 million, Ava Labs has conducted a number of coin offerings, and the company is now worth upwards of $290 million.
Etienne vantKruys in the News
A 2021 interview in CoinTelegraph News followed Etienne vantKruys’s journey from foster homes and homelessness to the top of the crypto world. Throughout the interview, vantKruys is very forthcoming, and discusses his father’s drug addiction along with his career struggles. In early 2022, The New York Times reported on vantKruys’s investment in Luna coin, and the appreciation of that investment over time. It is reported that vantKruys made upwards of $5 million on this investment.
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