Recently, I saw people bring up the story of Shen Yu again, and I couldn’t help but feel quite moved. This legendary figure in the crypto world became a billionaire at the age of 23. Later, he used 1000U to turn a fortune of 1億U (100 million U), which is roughly 720 million RMB—this is truly rare in the history of crypto.

As for where Shen Yu started, in 2011, while he was still a second-year undergrad, he came into contact with Bitcoin. At that time, Bitcoin had risen from $1 to $30, and he earned one million in a year. Back then, he was basically a dorm-room shut-in—skipping classes altogether. By 2013, he had already taken a leave of absence from school to found China’s first Bitcoin mining pool, f2pool, and at that time he was in graduate school.

But Shen Yu’s story wasn’t all smooth sailing. In early 2016, he sold 100,000 Ethereum for 20 yuan each. He earned more than 2 million, and the whole family was excited. However, later Ethereum climbed to as high as 12,000 per ETH, and theoretically he suffered losses of over 2 billion yuan. Only people who have been through it can probably understand that feeling.

During the 2013 market run-up, many friends in the crypto circle became rich overnight. Everyone was thinking about buying buildings in the Guomao area and doing crazy things like smashing money into hotels. But then Bitcoin crashed, and the entire industry entered a long, brutal winter. At that time, there was also a top student from USTC called “Kao Mao”—he created China’s early mining chips and even ran a virtual IPO on forums, holding an amount on the scale of several million Bitcoins. But by 2015, he suddenly disappeared—vanished as if from the face of the earth.

In 2015, Shen Yu was forced to liquidate his company and return to his hometown. On the last day of liquidation, he called all shareholders, bearing most of the losses himself. During that period, he even questioned himself. He tried making a game for a month, but in the end he still returned to the crypto world. Later, he once again set about preparing for a mining operation, founded China’s earliest Ethereum mining pool, and at one point controlled one-third of the world’s Ethereum hash rate.

There’s a pretty romantic detail: in 2014, Shen Yu married his girlfriend. Instead of buying a diamond ring, he mined two blocks and embedded them into the ring, with “i love you” engraved on the blocks.

In 2017, Shen Yu’s company was hit by hackers again, resulting in a loss of 100 million RMB. That same year, in December, Bitcoin broke through 20,000 USD. The cumulative gain for the year reached 21x. Back then, every day when he opened his eyes, hundreds of thousands (of millions) more appeared in his account balance. Even on Zhihu, he searched “What should I do if I have 100 million?” He was at a loss, not knowing how to handle it. He was only 23 years old that year.

Shen Yu’s story is like a microcosm of the crypto world’s floating-world scroll—there’s sudden wealth, losses, failures, and persistence. Looking back now, the ups and downs he experienced in this industry are more captivating than the lives of most people.