In 2011, Jihan Wu was a young financial analyst at a private equity firm in China, and he made a strange request of the people closest to him. He asked family and friends for money. About 100,000 yuan, in total. He used it to buy 900 bitcoins.
Wu was born in 1986 in Chongqing and went to Peking University, graduating in 2009 with degrees in economics and psychology. A safe career lay ahead of him. Instead he fell into Bitcoin, and the people who lent him the money were backing a bet on something most of them could not have understood. He then co-founded Babite, China's first Bitcoin community website, and translated Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper into Chinese.
Critics gave him a nickname, a pun on his given name, and he denied having that much influence.
Not every early bet worked. In 2012 he invested in the mining firm ASICMINER, and he lost money on hardware from Canaan Creative. The lesson he took from burning cash on other people's machines is not recorded, but what he did next is. In 2013 he co-founded Bitmain with the chip engineer Micree Zhan, and the company grew into the world's largest maker of bitcoin-mining chips, reporting US$2.5 billion of revenue in 2017.
The success had a cost. Wu backed raising bitcoin's capacity, a stance that helped lead to the August 2017 split that created Bitcoin Cash. Critics gave him a nickname, a pun on his given name, and he denied having that much influence. Later reports describe a power struggle with Zhan. In 2019 Wu stepped down as co-CEO, and he left Bitmain entirely in 2021.
By then he had already started over. In 2019 he founded Matrixport, a crypto financial services company, in Singapore, because China had banned crypto trading. He now holds Singapore citizenship. In August 2021 the firm raised about US$100 million at a valuation above US$1 billion, bringing its total to about US$129 million. A year later he was reported to be seeking another US$100 million at US$1.5 billion, though that round was not confirmed as closed. Through Bitdeer he also bought a Singapore vault for S$40 million in 2022.
Hurun counted his 2018 wealth at 16.5 billion yuan, around US$2.4 billion. But the quieter detail is the first one: a salaried analyst asking his family for a small pile of cash for something he believed in. Everything after rests on that early willingness to be wrong in front of the people who love you, and to keep going.