Due to a surging digital currency, Chris Larsen the co-founder and executive chairman of Ripple is now one of the five richest people in America

Forbes, citing sources at Ripple, claims Larsen enjoys 5.19 billion of Ripple’s digital coin, XRP and a 17% share in the company.

XRP hit a high of $3.84 recently and made Larsen’s holding worth $59.9. billion. The former Ripple CEO is now just barely ahead of Larry Ellison who ranked fifth on the Forbes 400 list with a net worth of $58.4 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, is fourth with a worth of $74.4 billion.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google founders, are eighth and 10th on the list.

Ripple has nothing to add to this statement concerning Chris Larsen.

The XRP coin increased 35,500 percent up to $2.30 last year. This outpaced Bitcoin as well as Ethereum. Ripper owns $61.3 billion of the 100 billion XRP coins in distribution, and this gives Ripple a market value of nearly $235.4 billion.

Ripple is a San Francisco-based startup and is using blockchain technology to manufacture a payment network that more than 100 financial institutions are using. Ripple’s website states that the XRP coin has a four-second settlement time. This is more than two minutes faster than ethereum and over an hour faster than bitcoin.

Cryptocurrency founders often hold large amounts of the digital coins they create. The anonymous bitcoin founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, has 980,000 bitcoins which is 4.7 percent of all bitcoins that will ever exists. This is based on analysis by Sergio Demian Lerner.

Now that bitcoin is $15,000, Nakamoto’s share is only $14.7 billion.