Wenceslao Casares was born on February 26, 1974. He is an Argentine tech entrepreneur. Casares is the CEO of the Bitcoin wallet provider Xapo and has founded several companies including Internet Argentina, Wanako Games, Patagon, Lemon Wallet, and Banco Lemon. He currently serves on the boards of PayPal, Endeavor, and Coin Center.
Casares is the eldest of four siblings in a sheep-farming family from Patagonia, Argentina. In high school, he received a Rotary Club scholarship as an exchange student in Washington, Pennsylvania. He later returned to Buenos Aires and studied business administration at the University of San Andrés for three years before dropping out to launch Argentina’s first Internet service provider, Internet Argentina S.A., in 1994.
Entrepreneurial Career
After leaving Internet Argentina, Casares founded the Argentine online brokerage Patagon in 1997. Patagon quickly established itself as the leading full-service financial internet portal in Latin America, eventually expanding into the United States, Spain, and Germany. Patagon was acquired by Banco Santander for $750 million and rebranded as Santander Online. Notable investors in Patagon included George Soros, Intel, Microsoft, JP Morgan Chase, and Fred Wilson.
In 2002, Casares launched Wanako Games (later renamed Behavior Santiago), a New York City–based video game development company. Wanako was best known for the successful game Assault Heroes and was acquired by Activision in 2007. That same year, Casares also founded Banco Lemon, a Brazilian bank which was acquired by Banco do Brasil in 2009.
Xapo
Casares went on to found Lemon Wallet, a digital wallet platform. In 2013, Lemon was acquired by U.S.-based LifeLock for approximately $43 million.
He is currently the CEO of Xapo, a Bitcoin wallet startup headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Xapo is believed to be the largest Bitcoin custodian in the world, allegedly holding up to $10 billion worth of cryptocurrency in underground vaults across five continents, including a former military bunker in Switzerland. Xapo has raised $40 million from top Silicon Valley venture capital firms. Known widely as “Patient Zero,” Casares is credited with persuading tech leaders like Bill Gates and Reid Hoffman to invest in Bitcoin.