I recently came across a quite interesting story about a Swiss crypto investor, Dadvan Yousuf—his journey from being a refugee in Iraqi Kurdistan to becoming Switzerland’s youngest self-made billionaire is certainly not ordinary.

Yousuf’s story began in Iraq in 2000. His father was a Peshmerga fighter, who fled to Switzerland before he was born. Three years later, his mother brought him and his two brothers to Switzerland, settling in Neuchâtel in 2003. The family obtained refugee status in 2004, and later moved to Ipsach. Against this backdrop, he developed a strong interest in the world of finance—especially in Bitcoin and international remittances.

What is truly impressive is his investment starting point. At age 11, he sold toys to raise money to invest in Bitcoin, using 15 euros to buy 10 BTC. That decision later changed the course of his life. In 2012, he bought 1,000 bitcoins for 11,126 euros. By 2016, Dadvan Yousuf had started focusing on Ethereum, buying 16,000 ETH at a total cost of 134,000 euros. Through these cryptocurrency trades, he became a multi-millionaire in his 20s.

In 2017, he studied for a period at a Swiss institution of vocational education, and later completed training at a real estate company in Bern. Around the same time, he claimed to have developed an automated cryptocurrency trading software that uses algorithmic analysis—of market data, social media, macroeconomic data, and publicly available statements related to crypto—to predict price volatility. In early 2021, he founded the Dohrnii Foundation to promote the development of this software and crypto tokens.

That same year, he also acquired a majority stake in Crowdlitoken, a Liechtenstein startup focused on tokenized real estate investment. Crowdlitoken received approval from FINMA to sell tokens in Switzerland, with a cap of $205 million. After the acquisition, Yousuf became CEO and joined the board. In the same year, at the age of 21, he was named to Forbes 30 Under 30, being recognized as one of Switzerland’s youngest self-made millionaires.

In early 2022, Blick reported that his assets were valued at 270 million Swiss francs. But also in February 2022, some media began investigating the background of his business activities, claiming that there were irregularities in trading. Yousuf then filed defamation lawsuits in March against two SRF investigative reporters. By August 2024, the Zurich High Court ruled that the two reporters could not substantiate their allegations—marking the first time in SRF’s history that journalists lost a defamation case. SRF was ordered to pay Yousuf’s legal fees of 10,676 Swiss francs.

But the story didn’t end there. On November 11, 2024, SRF issued three separate public statements defending the journalists, emphasizing editorial standards and its commitment to protecting sources. Yousuf then filed new defamation and civil lawsuits, seeking compensation of 13 million Swiss francs, claiming that SRF’s statements themselves were defamatory. Ultimately, SRF withdrew the disputed parts of the original article and changed the headline.

Meanwhile, his crypto investment activities also attracted attention from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, FINMA. In May 2022, the Dohrnii Foundation was investigated for carrying out multiple regulated activities, including acting as a securities firm without obtaining the required FINMA license. Yousuf stepped down as CEO in February 2023, and the Dohrnii Foundation was dissolved in June of the same year. Since 2023, he has also faced a criminal investigation by the Bern Office of Public Security. This story is indeed quite complex—from an investment prodigy to facing multiple investigations—suggesting that success and risk in the crypto space often come as two sides of the same coin.