Wu Jihan's eight-year entrepreneurial history: from a top student at Peking University to a pioneer in the Bitcoin industry

In just 8 years, Wu Jihan transformed from a venture capital analyst into a billionaire entrepreneur. The companies he founded hold a significant position in the blockchain industry, but his story is also filled with controversy and rivalry.

The Investment Enthusiast’s BTC Awakening

Born in Chongqing in 1986, Wu Jihan is a typical “child of others’ families.” He holds dual degrees in Economics and Psychology from Peking University. After graduating in 2009, he entered the investment industry as a venture capital analyst. His bookshelf is filled with works on monetary theory, and Warren Buffett is his idol.

In 2011, when this professional venture capitalist first encountered Bitcoin, his professional instincts drove him to study it deeply. Without hesitation, he invested 100,000 yuan to buy 900 BTC. This investment appreciated to 675,000 yuan after two years (at the then-price of $750 per coin), becoming the seed capital for his later entrepreneurial ventures.

That same year, Wu Jihan translated Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” making him the first person to translate the white paper into Chinese. Although Li Xiaolai also did a translation around the same time, Wu Jihan’s version remains the most widely used due to its accuracy and dissemination, earning him the label of “BTC evangelist.”

From Bibit to Bitmain: Transformation and Growth

In 2013, Wu Jihan co-founded Bibit with engineer Chang Jian, the first BTC forum in the Chinese-speaking world. Although initially just a simple community, it has grown over ten years into an important hub of information in the cryptocurrency community.

With keen insight, Wu Jihan soon realized that controlling mining chips was equivalent to controlling the “printing press” of Bitcoin. In 2013, he co-founded Bitmain with Janketuan, an integrated circuit designer from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, focusing on high-speed, low-power custom chips for blockchain and AI.

In November of the same year, Bitmain launched its first Antminer S1. Subsequent iterations, including S2, S3, S5, and S7, rapidly upgraded, making Bitmain the world’s largest manufacturer of mining hardware. By 2017, Bitmain’s annual revenue reached $2.5 billion (about 15.8 billion RMB). Wu Jihan was named one of the top ten most influential people in blockchain by CoinDesk.

Bitmain’s business also includes Antpool, BTC.com, and other well-known mining pools like BTC.top and Viabtc.

Hard Fork and the Birth of BCH — The Most Controversial Decision

On May 19, 2017, Bitcoin’s price broke through $2,000, but network congestion caused transaction fees to soar. Wu Jihan advocated for scaling solutions, while the Bitcoin Core development team insisted on maintaining the 1MB block size limit and developing second-layer solutions off-chain.

This disagreement intensified. Confident in his judgment, Wu Jihan decided to hard fork, increasing the block size limit from 1MB to 8MB, directly boosting BTC network efficiency by eight times. On August 1, 2017, ViaBTC, an investment of Bitmain, announced a formal fork, leading to the creation of Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

This move made Wu Jihan a “villain” in the BTC community. Supportive BCH mining pools quickly enabled mining switching, and a large portion of hash power shifted from BTC to BCH. Many BTC users could not accept this “split” and labeled Wu Jihan as “Satoshi’s traitor” and “JIHAD.”

However, BCH did not flourish as expected. Starting in late 2018, with the price plummeting, BCH gradually became a second- or third-tier coin. Even during the 2021 bull market, BCH failed to regain its former glory. Currently, BCH trades at around $473.07, while BTC hovers near $69,350, illustrating the stark difference.

Divergence of the Two Founders

Bitmain’s success planted the seeds of division. Wu Jihan, with a background in investment management, leaned toward finance and blockchain business, while Janketuan, with a technical background from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was dedicated to AI chip development.

In late 2018, as the mining hardware market cooled, this disagreement turned into open conflict. In July 2019, Wu Jihan wrote an internal letter revealing a funding gap of $300 million. The ensuing internal disputes led to large-scale layoffs, and the two founders even faced legal battles.

After more than a year of turmoil, they finally reached a settlement. In January 2021, Wu Jihan resigned as CEO and chairman. Janketuan acquired Wu Jihan’s and other shareholders’ stakes for $600 million and continued to lead Bitmain. Bitmain was also spun off, with subsidiaries like BitDeer and overseas mining farms becoming independent alongside Wu Jihan.

The New Chapter of BitDeer

Wu Jihan announced the establishment of BitDeer Group, serving as chairman, focusing on blockchain infrastructure development. On April 14, 2023, BitDeer went public on NASDAQ, with a current market cap of approximately $870 million.

In contrast, Janketuan, who remained at Bitmain, continues to focus on AI chips and mining hardware, but the company’s reputation and market size are no longer what they once were.

Controversial Figure or Industry Pioneer?

What kind of person Wu Jihan is depends on different perspectives. Compared to the more polished Li Xiaolai and Sun Yuchen, Wu Jihan, who is less skilled in public relations, resembles the protagonists of fantasy novels—gifted, proud, sometimes capricious like a tyrant.

His hard fork of BCH made him a controversial figure among BTC supporters, with various nicknames flying around. But from another angle, Wu Jihan indeed promoted the development of mining hardware, improved miners’ efficiency, and contributed to the dissemination of blockchain technology.

From a self-made venture analyst to the founder of Bitmain, and then to the founder of BitDeer, Wu Jihan’s trajectory proves one fact: in the world of crypto, full of opportunities and traps, ambition, execution, and a bit of luck can turn an ordinary person into an industry patriarch. But this patriarch’s story is far from as simple as market rumors suggest.