College Dropout Natalie Arabian Built Her Net Worth in Crypto

Crypto influencer and investor Natalie Arabian dropped out of college to build her net worth in digital currency. Arabian passes her crypto knowledge on to thousands of followers on Twitter, Tik Tok, Instagram, and YouTube.

“My entire net worth is in alts, sorry im not here for a 2x,” Arabian, also known as “rea.eth” and “moon_guurl,” tweeted in October 2021.

Arabian’s entrance into the crypto world started in 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a recent interview with Insider, Arabian said a few months into the pandemic shut down, she started getting nervous that the Federal Reserve would print more money to keep the economy afloat. So, she started looking for alternative investment opportunities.

Her first crypto purchase was Bitcoin at $6,700 and Ether at $173, and she continued to buy over 200 Ether tokens over the next few months at an average cost of under $300, Insider reports. That summer, instead of completing her college degree online, she quit school to focus on investing in cryptocurrency.

"The amount of money I started making was unlike anything that I could've made after college, and it got to the point where the opportunity cost of studying and being in school was just too great to ignore," Arabian told Insider.

Insider mentioned that Arabian was studying biology and didn’t say at which college, but it appears that she was a student at the University of Southern California (USC). A 2015 article in the blog Everyday Biochemistry identifies Arabian as a sophomore at the USC School of Pharmacy who won an undergraduate award for Drug Discovery and Development. It also says that she planned to pursue a Ph.D.

“I think it’s really important for undergrads to know or at least have a good idea about what they want to study before they go to grad school,” Arabian told the blog.

Arabian was one of several undergrad students participating in a summer program by the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET). A search of Twitter shows a 2016 tweet of Arabian at an ASPET conference posing next to a picture of her on an ASPET banner.

But those days are behind Arabian now. She took the money she saved for grad school and invested it in crypto instead. Currently, under the pseudonyms “rea.eth” “R.E.A.” and “moon_gurrl,” Arabian has over 30,000 Twitter and Tik Tok followers and 761 YouTube subscribers who turn to her for advice on crypto and Web 3.0 investing.

"I didn't intend to become an influencer in the beginning. It came from a very organic place of having fun on Twitter and meeting people with a similar interest in shaking up 'legacy finance,'" Arabian told Insider.

Arabian isn't investing in Bitcoin anymore and has switched her focus solely to Ethereum. She thinks Ether is on track to become a deflationary asset as some of the tokens are taken out of circulation, Insider reports.

“I'm a big advocate for just sticking with ethereum since most people get burned on other tokens," Arabian told Insider.