In the previous lesson, we discussed how two individuals pushed open the door to capital and commercialization in the mining circle: "Pumpkin Zhang" — Zhang Nangeng, and "Fried Cat" — Jiang Xinyu. Although they jointly ushered in the golden age of the mining circle, the person who truly elevated the mining industry to its peak was someone else, and his name is Wu Jihan.

Compared to the early entrepreneurial environment of blockchain, Wu Jihan could be considered a model of elite entrepreneurship. After graduating from Peking University, he entered the investment banking sector and, within two years, rose from an investment analyst to an investment manager. Logically, such a person shouldn’t have much to do with mining, but by chance, in 2011, Wu Jihan encountered Bitcoin on a BBS forum and fell in love with it.

Wu Jihan said that when he read Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper at the time, he wrote down these words: "To me at that time, Bitcoin was a beacon of light. I knew my life would eventually change because of it, and I hoped it would rewrite the trajectory of my life. I would break free from all my existing frameworks to achieve true ideals and the future." He certainly didn’t expect that this casually written sentence would years later become reality—Bitcoin truly changed his life.

Fast forward to 2013, when the mining industry was booming, and the early stages of the mining machine wars were underway. A flood of capital and talent poured into the industry. But what about Wu Jihan?

He had already met Fried Cat in 2012, just as Fried Cat was returning to China to start his business. Out of both his love for Bitcoin and his background in investment banking, Wu Jihan invested in Fried Cat’s company when most people couldn’t understand its potential. Six months later, with the mass production of ASIC miners, Fried Cat became the first "mining tycoon" in the Bitcoin world, and Wu Jihan reaped nearly a thousandfold return on his investment.

Additionally, Wu Jihan was the first person in China to translate the Bitcoin Whitepaper into Chinese, making him one of the earliest blockchain evangelists in the country. Given this background, Wu Jihan naturally wasn’t content with just being an investor. With boundless optimism for the industry, he decided to step into the mining machine game himself.

Wu Jihan first reached out to Zhan Ketuan, who was researching chips at the time, through an alumni directory. He shared his understanding of Bitcoin in an email. After careful consideration, Zhan Ketuan agreed to Wu Jihan’s proposal, and together they founded what would later become the renowned mining giant—Bitmain.
After six months of research and development, the first-generation Antminer was born. Thanks to its extremely low power consumption, Bitmain’s miner gradually secured a foothold in the competitive mining machine market.

However, winter was coming. At the time, no one realized that the external environment was quietly changing. In 2014, due to policy shifts and the hacking of the largest cryptocurrency exchange at the time, Bitcoin entered its first-ever bear market. Faced with a continuously declining market, the entire mining industry was in despair, with numerous mining machines shutting down and mining farms closing. Among the two industry giants at the time, Zhang Nangeng chose to temporarily exit the market and shift to chip development, while Fried Cat vanished entirely from the mining circle amid the bear market, becoming one of the industry’s greatest mysteries, second only to Satoshi Nakamoto.

Amid this great depression, Wu Jihan chose to hold firm. By continuing to develop new mining machines, he captured the void left by the departing giants, preparing for the unknown bull market ahead. Persistence paid off—after two long years of decline and silence, the market finally regained its vitality.

From then on, Bitmain officially rose to prominence. After two years of accumulation, Bitmain nearly monopolized the entire mining machine market. With the launch of the Antminer S9, Bitmain pushed computing power to new heights. At its peak, its Antpool and BTC.com mining pools accounted for nearly 50% of the network’s total hash rate. Thus, Wu Jihan became the new "mining tycoon," succeeding Fried Cat, and led the entire mining circle into its next era of glory…