The Winklevoss brothers have become the first "Bitcoin billionaires" after the cryptocurrency reached a record $11,395 per coin on the market last week, The Telegraph reported.
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who had sued Mark Zuckerberg charging that he stole the idea for Facebook from them, invested $11 million of the $65 million they received in their lawsuit against the social media giant to invest into Bitcoin four years ago, Fortune reported.
The Telegraph said that, after ups and down, the bet started to pay off in Bitcoin's most recent surge about a year ago and unprecedented acceleration in recent days.
CBS News reported that the Securities & Exchange Commission earlier this year rejected the Winklevoss brothers' request to launch a bitcoin exchange traded fund on the grounds that the unregulated cryptocurrency market is prone to manipulation.
Despite the roadblocks, bitcoin's market capitalization now exceeds $191 billion, according to the website Coinmarketcap. That tops fast food giant McDonald's ($138 billion), investment bank Morgan Stanley ($95 billion) and retailer Target ($34 billion), CBS News reported.
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, or a digital currency, that uses rules of cryptography for regulation and generation of units of currency, according to the Economic Times. Bitcoins are designed to be 'self-contained' for their value, removing the need for banks to move and store them, the publication sated.
The Winklevoss brothers own one of the largest portfolios of Bitcoin in the world, purchasing them when they traded at just $120, according to Fortune. Some, though, have bristled at giving the twins the title of "first Bitcoin billionaires," CBS News said.
"The Winklevoss twins are not the first bitcoin billionaires, but simply the ones with the biggest PR and media outreach, which cements their position as forward-thinking pioneers, and as a result, it will definitely encourage more people to buy bitcoin," said Angel Versetti, cofounder and chief executive of Ambrosus, which uses so-called blockchain technology used in bitcoin to check the quality of medicine and other products, CBS News said.