¿Quién es Jihan Wu?
Jihan Wu is a Chinese billionaire who hails from Chongqing, China. With a net worth of $2.39 billion, he is considered one of the top five youngest billionaires in Asia. In 2013, he co-founded Bitmain with Micree Zhan. Bitmain is China's largest cryptocurrency mining-chip company; it specializes in selling ASIC chips used to mine bitcoin and a variety of other cryptocurrencies.
He first learned about Bitcoin back in 2011 and purchased 900 Bitcoin with money he raised from his friends and family. Enamored by the technology, he was the first person to translate the Bitcoin whitepaper into Mandarin Chinese and even developed China’s first Chinese Bitcoin community site with his friend. From then on, he became interested in the technical aspects of the platform and became acquainted with a microelectronics engineer, Micree Zhan. Together, they developed the world’s largest computer chip company for mining Bitcoin.
Outspoken about the limited transaction capacity of Bitcoin, he led the hard fork for Bitcoin Cash in 2017. He also supports Bitcoin Unlimited, a project that aims to increase BTC block size and reduce congestion. Wu’s company Bitmain also oversees several BTC mining pools including Antpool, BTC.com and ConnectBTC; collectively, they hold the largest hashrate distribution. Bitmain is an enormously profitable and influential enterprise, and made over $300 million in the first 4 months of 2020. It’s no surprise that Wu is one of the few in crypto featured on Forbes' billionaires list.
In late January 2021, Wu stepped down from Bitmain, citing a series of long-term disagreements with his co-founder.
As of present, he has taken on a Chairman position at Bitdeer, a cryptocurrency cloud mining platform.
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Picture source: Bloomberg Via Getty Images