Altcoins associated with a 29-year-old self-made cryptocurrency billionaire are surging in popularity

• Cryptocurrencies associated with Sam Bankman-Fried are surging.
• Solana and Serum are each up over 30% this week, while FTX coin is up more than 40% over the past month.
• Solana is now the 14th largest cryptocurrency by marketcap at over $12.4 billion.
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Altcoins associated with crypto whiz Sam Bankman-Fried, the head Alameda Research and the FTX derivatives exchange, are surging in popularity, according to data from CoinMarketCap.com.

Bankman-Fried's Solana has jumped over 35% in the past week moving it to the 14^th spot in CoinMarketCap's list of the top cryptocurrencies worldwide. The altcoin now has a market cap of over $12.4 billion.

Serum, a cryptocurrency used by Bankman-Fried's decentralized derivatives exchange is also up more than 40% in the past week, hitting a market cap of $468 million.

Finally, the price for FTX coin, which is used on Bankman-Fried's FTX derivatives exchange, has jumped over 40% in the past month to hit a $4.9 billion market cap.

Bankman-Fried started Alameda Research in 2017 after a three-year stint at the quantitative-trading firm Jane Street Capital. Since then he has established himself as a top trader in the crypto space.

In a recent appearance on Bloomberg's "Odd Lots" podcast, Bankman-Fried told Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal that he used Bitcoin arbitrage opportunities in Korea (known as the kimchi premium) to net returns of 10% a day from his multi-million dollar portfolio.

The 29-year-old is now one of only a few self-made cryptocurrency billionaires, according to data from Forbes.

Bankman-Fried told Bloomberg that he believes the rally in his solana cryptocurrency is "partially a delayed reaction to the work that's been put into the ecosystem over the last year, and the need to find scalable solutions for DeFi as the ecosystem grows."

DeFi or decentralized finance refers to blockchain-based trading and lending platforms that are automated by software.

DeFi applications continue to disrupt the finance industry. If you want to learn more, check out Insider's recent breakdown of the Defi phenomenon and the 10 largest assets in the space.

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