This is a very interesting story. Eight years from nothing to a fortune worth billions sounds like an entrepreneurship myth, but Wu Jihan’s experience actually reflects the brutal early growth of the entire crypto market.

He is not a chosen one. In 2005, he was admitted to the Peking University School of Economics, and later went on to earn a double degree in psychology. After graduating, he entered the venture capital world—everything about that is fairly ordinary. The real turning point came in 2011. When he first encountered Bitcoin, his career instincts as a venture capitalist led him to invest 100,000 yuan to buy 900 BTC. At the time, nobody knew what that decision would change, but two years later, when BTC rose to $750 each, Wu Jihan already held a sizable amount of startup capital.

In 2013, he rented a server with engineer Chang Jian and set up the first Chinese Bitcoin forum, BitcoinTalk China. More importantly, Wu Jihan also translated Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper, becoming the first person to localize the BTC white paper into Chinese. That move earned him the label of “evangelist” in the community and laid the groundwork for his speaking power in the industry.

But what truly made Wu Jihan the “Mining King” was his obsession with mining rig chip technology. He realized a key point: whoever can build mining machines controls the power in the Bitcoin world. In 2013, he co-founded Bitmain with Jihan, and launched the AntMiner S1. In the years that followed, with the continuous iterations of the S2, S3, S5, and S7, Bitmain became the world’s largest mining hardware manufacturer. By 2017, the company’s revenue was about $2.5 billion, and Wu Jihan was named by Coindesk as one of the ten most influential people in blockchain.

But the turning point also came in 2017. When the Bitcoin network began to get congested and transaction fees soared, Wu Jihan advocated for scaling, while the Bitcoin Core team firmly opposed it. The disagreement ultimately led to a decisive outcome: on August 1, 2017, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) was officially launched. Wu Jihan supported BCH mining through the mining pool under Bitmain, which caused him to be completely branded as a “bully” in the BTC community. Some even, based on a homophone of his English name “Jihan,” called him “JIHAD.”

After that, the story became rather heavy. In 2018, the coin price crashed, and Bitmain fell into difficulty. Wu Jihan and Jihan’s strategic differences also fully erupted. After a series of internal struggles, dismissals, and lawsuits, the two finally reached a settlement in 2020. Wu Jihan chose to leave, taking the mining-sharing business BitDeer with him; it went public on NASDAQ in 2023.

Looking back now, Wu Jihan is a very complex person. He is not as seasoned and streetwise as Li Xiaolai, and he does not deliberately package himself the way some others do. He is more like an exceptionally talented but somewhat willful young man—bold enough to go all-in, bold enough to take on the entire BTC community, and also willing to take responsibility for the consequences of his judgments. He brought efficient mining machines to miners and helped drive industry development, but for the BCH matter he was also criticized for years.

In the end, BitDeer successfully listed, and Wu Jihan’s net worth also entered the billion-yuan club. But the person who once orchestrated BCH now sees BCH’s price at just over 381, which has long relegated it to the ranks of second- and third-tier old coins. What’s interesting is that when he supported BCH with mining pool hash power back then, he probably didn’t expect such an outcome. This story tells us that even figures at the pinnacle of the industry sometimes struggle to predict the market and human nature.