Anthony Di Iorio
Anthony Di Iorio | |
|---|---|
| Born | Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Occupation(s) | Entrepreneur, business executive |
| Known for | Co-founder of Ethereum, founder and CEO of Decentral Inc., first chief digital officer of Toronto Stock Exchange |
| Notable work | Jaxx wallet |
Anthony Di Iorio is a prominent Canadian business figure recognized primarily as a co-founder of Ethereum and an early backer of Bitcoin. He established and leads Decentral, a blockchain enterprise responsible for creating the Jaxx wallet. Additionally, Di Iorio was the inaugural chief digital officer at the Toronto Stock Exchange. As of February 2018, his net worth was estimated by Forbes to be between $750 million and $1 billion.
Early life
Raised in the northern part of Toronto, Ontario, Di Iorio has two older siblings. He obtained a degree in marketing from Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University). Starting in the early 1990s, he engaged in website development and later invested in rental properties within Toronto. In 2012, he divested his real estate holdings to concentrate on Bitcoin investments and to establish ventures in the cryptocurrency industry.
Career
Di Iorio’s professional journey began in marketing at a machinery manufacturing firm before he joined his family’s patio-door business located in Woodbridge, Ontario, which was sold in 2008. With his father’s support, he then initiated a geothermal drilling company that operated briefly.
His introduction to bitcoin came in 2012 via the podcast Free Talk Live, driven by a distrust of conventional economics and an anti-authoritarian outlook. He acquired his initial bitcoin at approximately $9.73 and founded the Toronto Bitcoin Meetup Group, which rapidly expanded to hundreds of participants and eventually led to forming the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada.
In 2013, alongside Steve Dakh, Di Iorio co-founded KryptoKit, a Bitcoin wallet extension for Chrome that facilitated cryptocurrency payments. By 2014, influential individuals such as Vitalik Buterin, Erik Voorhees, and Roger Ver had joined this initiative. That same year, Di Iorio co-founded Ethereum, a cryptocurrency platform that reached a valuation of $7 billion with a market capitalization of $1.6 billion by 2017.
In 2021, citing concerns over security, he declared his intention to withdraw from the cryptocurrency market.
TSX, Jaxx, and boards
In January 2016, Di Iorio was named as the first chief digital officer for the Toronto Stock Exchange by TMX Group. The next month, he launched Jaxx—a unified wallet supporting both Bitcoin and Ethereum—and later that year departed from TSX to dedicate himself fully to this project. He serves as founder and CEO of Decentral Inc., the company behind Jaxx.
Di Iorio has contributed to developing evaluation frameworks for initial coin offerings and worked on integrating multiple cryptocurrencies into a unified financial system. In 2018, Forbes included him among the top 20 wealthiest individuals in the cryptocurrency sector.