I’ve been paying close attention to changes in wealth in the cryptocurrency market recently and discovered a particularly interesting phenomenon. The founder of a major exchange—who once sat atop the throne as the richest Chinese person—has now already fallen out of the top 100 in wealth rankings. This story of rising from the peak to the bottom is well worth reflecting on.

Do you remember what it was like back in 2021? With a fortune of nearly $100 billion, this founder was shining and once even surpassed the chairman of Nongfu Spring and the founder of ByteDance, becoming the most dazzling newcomer at the time. But in just two short years, his net worth shrank to less than $70 billion, and in the latest Hurun Rich List he is already ranked 97th. How big is this gap? You can probably imagine.

This founder’s story is actually quite legendary. Born in 1977 in Jiangsu, he later went to Canada to study and graduated from McGill University with a degree in computer science. After graduation, he joined Bloomberg as a software developer, and in less than two years he became an important member of this global financial information giant. He served as a team leader in places including New York, London, and Tokyo. And it was also during his time at Bloomberg that he realized just how outrageous the fees for international remittances were—planting the seeds for his later involvement with Bitcoin.

After he first got involved with Bitcoin in 2013, he was deeply attracted by the convenience and liquidity of this crypto asset. In 2014, he even sold his house in Shanghai to invest in Bitcoin, and later he also joined a domestic exchange as its technical director. The real turning point came in June 2017, when he founded this major exchange, and in the same year, in July, it launched the exchange’s token, BNB. At the time, nobody could have imagined that this decision would, within just a few years, make him the richest Chinese person.

The speed of this exchange’s rise was truly astonishing. In just a few months, its user base grew from 1.2 million to 6 million, and by 2022 it had grown to 12 million users, becoming the undisputed number one exchange in the industry. Back then, the difference between its trading volume and the second-place exchange was as high as tenfold—an absolutely crushing dominance.

But good times didn’t last. In the first half of 2023, U.S. regulators began taking action in succession. The CFTC and the SEC brought multiple charges against this exchange and its founder one after another, including operating without registration, misappropriating customer funds, evading regulation, and other serious issues. Once the regulatory storm hit, the crypto market fell immediately, and BNB’s price dropped by more than 9% on the day. After that, BNB remained sluggish and never again had a chance to stage a comeback.

Since then, the exchange’s asset size has fallen straight down from over $70 billion to the current $7.357 billion—shrinking by nearly 90%. Even more striking is that the trading volume, which once had a tenfold lead over the second-place exchange, now is only a little more than 2 times. Its U.S. business has also been severely harmed; the market performance of a certain CEX’s U.S. platform is nearly close to zero.

I looked up the latest data. The exchange’s current token price is around $654.90, and its circulating market cap is approximately $8.827 billion. This number may look decent, but compared with its former glory, it really gives the feeling that nothing is the same anymore.

The founder once said a famous line: “If you can’t persist, you won’t be wealthy.” Ironically, this saying was proven in the opposite way on him. Faced with the heavy pressure of U.S. regulation, even if he keeps pushing forward, it’s still hard to return to what it used to be. Now the exchange needs to find room to survive in a strictly regulated environment, and the road ahead is indeed full of uncertainty.

From being the richest Chinese person to ranking 97th, from a tenfold lead to only a twofold gap, from a net worth of $100 billion to $70 billion—this story tells us that nothing in the crypto market is eternal. Regulation, the market, liquidity—any one factor can rewrite the course of your life.