Recently, I’ve come across more discussions about Wu Jihan again, and it suddenly reminded me of the story of this former blockchain celebrity. From a dual-degree top graduate at Peking University to an entrepreneur with a fortune of over 100 million, and now a controversial figure—this trajectory is truly worth sitting down and talking about properly.

When it comes to Wu Jihan’s beginnings, we have to start with his first contact with Bitcoin in 2011. At that time, he was working in venture capital. Relying on his professional analytical ability, he invested 100,000 yuan at once to buy 900 BTC. That decision paid off two years later—by 2013, the price of BTC had surged to 750 dollars, and the coins he held suddenly became worth a lot more. It was also this early gain that gave him his first pot of gold for starting a business.

Interestingly, Wu Jihan is not only an investor but also a preacher. He translated Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper, becoming the first person to translate the BTC white paper into Chinese, and this version is still the most widely circulated one for spreading information. Later, he co-founded Bitbabit with the engineer Chang Jian to establish the first Chinese BTC forum. Back then, no one could have imagined how much influence this forum would have on the later cryptocurrency ecosystem.

But what truly made Wu Jihan a household name in one shot was Bitmain. In 2013, he teamed up with Jihan from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and together they founded the company, focusing on the design of mining machine chips. At the time, he realized a key point: whoever could build mining machines would hold power in the Bitcoin world. The launch of the Antminer S series changed the entire mining landscape, and Bitmain quickly became the world’s largest mining hardware manufacturer. In 2017, Bitmain’s revenue reached 2.5 billion dollars, and Wu Jihan was also named one of the ten most influential people in blockchain by Coindesk.

However, what truly turned Wu Jihan into a controversial figure was the BCH fork incident in 2017. At that time, the BTC network was congested, transaction fees soared, and Wu Jihan advocated for scaling. But the Bitcoin Core development team firmly opposed it, and the two sides completely broke ties. Wu Jihan decided to carry out a hard fork, expanding the block size from 1MB to 8MB. On August 1, 2017, Bitcoin Cash BCH was officially born. This decision left him with the nickname “bully” in the BTC community, and some even called him Satoshi Nakamoto’s “traitor.”

Ironically, the performance after the BCH fork didn’t turn out as well as Wu Jihan had expected. Judging from the bull market of 2021, BCH’s price increase was far less than expected, and it gradually slid into being a second- or third-tier coin. And with BCH supported solely by Bitmain, its future direction became a mystery.

Starting in the second half of 2018, the coin prices plunged, and competitors flooded in, dealing a severe blow to Bitmain’s mining machine business. Worse still, the disagreement between Wu Jihan and Jihan over company strategy grew bigger and bigger—Wu Jihan wanted to focus on finance and blockchain business, while Jihan was more optimistic about AI chips. In 2019, their internal fighting escalated to an extreme level, even going all the way to court. In the end, the two sides reached a settlement, and Wu Jihan chose to leave.

In January 2021, Wu Jihan officially stepped down from his position as CEO of Bitmain and founded Bitdeer Group. This spin-off was a new beginning for him. Bitdeer focuses on building blockchain infrastructure. In April 2023, it rang the bell to go public on the Nasdaq, and its current market value is about 870 million dollars.

From building his career from scratch to founding the world’s largest mining hardware company, and now launching an independent venture—Wu Jihan’s story is full of drama. He isn’t good at packaging himself, but he has left a deep mark on the blockchain industry through his real expertise. No matter how the outside world evaluates him, his contributions to the development of the entire industry are well recognized. Some hate him, and some admire him—but no one can deny his influence. The experiences of such a person are truly worth us thinking about carefully.