Journalist: Teresa Wang
According to Coinmarketcap, as of October 2018, seven out of thirty coins with the highest market cap have been founded by Chinese nationals. While these Chinese entrepreneurs have all achieved success in this nascent industry, each entrepreneur has a very diverse educational and entrepreneurial story.
Some of these entrepreneurs began as bitcoin evangelists as early as 2010. Others were industry professionals who came in with entrepreneurial know-how and a clear product roadmap. Still others joined merely because they ran into the right person at the right time. This article will provides an overview of the Chinese companies and leaders that have made it big with the turbulent cryptocurrency industry.
Here is the list and brief introduction of the ten entrepreneurs leading the Chinese blockchain industry:
1. Da HongFei
Company: NEO. A public blockchain project founded in 2014, NEO is often called “China’s Ethereum”
Position: CEO
Market Cap: $1 billion
Although Da Hongfei is a liberal arts major who studied English literature, Da HongFei was passionate about coding. He is a self-taught coder and started to publish articles in the blockchain community from as early as 2012. Before NEO, Da HongFei founded Antshares in 2014 which rebranded to NEO in 2017. In addition to these two successful ventures, he co-founded OnChain - a private company to promote the application of NEO.
2. Jun Li
Company: OnChain. The private blockchain company was founded in 2014 to support the development of NEO application.
Position: Co-founder
Market cap: $379 million.
Before joining the blockchain industry, Jun was a project manager at Infosys and technology strategist at China Financial Future Exchanges. Jun joined NEO’s CEO Da Hongfei to cofound OnChain as chief architect.
3. Patrick Dai
Company: Qtum. The public blockchain project was founded in 2016 to “combine the best of both bitcoin and ethereum worlds.”
Position: Co-founder
Market cap: $325 million
Similar to Da HongFei, Patrick started to get involved in blockchain technology back in 2012, when pursuing his Ph.D. at Chinese Academy of Science. Patrick gained popularity by writing a blockchain developer manual in the blockchain community. Following the success of this manual, Dai dropped out from his Ph.D. program to start his first venture BitSE, a bitcoin mining company. Shortly thereafter, he founded Qtum which found success to the tune of $325 million and became a business tycoon.
4. Sunny Lu
Company:VeChain. A public enterprise blockchain project founded in 2018 intended to provides supply chain traceability and RFID integrations for enterprise users.
Position: CEO
Year founded: $661 million
Sunny, who started as an engineering major, has an interesting career trajectory among the blockchain entrepreneurs. Prior to founding VeChain, Sunny was the Greater China CIO for Louis Vuitton and in charge of the IT systems for Bacardi. By leveraging his experience in luxury goods, Sunny correctly identified and capitalized on a market demand for blockchain product tracing and IoT, especially among enterprise clients and found success with VeChain.
5. Justin Sun
Company: Tron. A public blockchain project founded in 2014 that is a world top 10 crypto networkand web 4.0 blockchain dapp platform.
Position: CEO
Market cap: $1.6 billion
Justin is the youngest and probably among the controversial entrepreneurs on this list. Justin got his bachelor degree in history at Peking University, and master's degree in political economy at University of Pennsylvania. Before founding Tron, he was the China representative for Ripple Lab and founded Callme, a social network app. Subsequently, Tron Foundation acquired BitTorrent for $140M.
6. Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan
Company: Bitmain. Bitmain is the world’s largest bitcoin mining chip manufacturer.
Position: Co-founders
Valuation: $40 billion
Cofounders Jihan and Micree own over 50% of Bitmain’s equity with a total estimated value of $8 billion. Jihan and Micree met in 2013 when Micree was raising funds for his startup DIVAIP. At the time Jihan convinced Micree to bring in his technical expertise to help with the development of Bitmain.
Jihan studied psychology and economics at Peking University. Jihan, who worked as an equity analyst after college, leads investment strategy for the pair. He started bitcoin investment in 2011 and founded 8btc, now the largest Chinese blockchain community and media outlet.
Micree graduated from Shandong University with an electrical engineering degree and got his master from Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Microelectronics. He is the engineering mastermind behind Bitmain. Prior to Bitmain, he was the head of R&D of integrated circuit department at Unitend Technologies. In 2010, he founded DivaIP, a startup for TV set-top boxes.
7. Changpeng Zhao
Company: Binance. Founded in 2017, Binance is the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.
Position: CEO
Changpeng, who often goes by CZ, grew up partly in Canada and got his bachelor degree in computer science from McGill University. Before joining the blockchain industry, CZ ran a startup developing trading software. He identified the opportunity for cryptocurrency trading in 2013 and joined OKCoin as CTO shortly after. CZ parted ways with OKCoin in 2017 when he started Binance. Despite Binance’s late entrance into the cryptocurrency listing scene, it has become the world’s largest crypto exchange in a matter of only six months.
8. Star Xu
Company: OKCoin. OKCoin is the second largest cryptocurrency exchange that was founded in 2012
Position: CEO
Before Star’s involvement with OKCoin, he was the CTO at Docin.com, a Chinese document sharing platform. After trading bitcoin for a while, Star discovered the need for better user experience and decided to start a cryptocurrency exchange. Notably, he has recently gotten involved in an alleged fraud case with crypto future trading and has been taken into custody by the Shanghai Police Department.
9. Leon Li
Company: Huobi. Huobi is the fifth largest cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2013
Position: Founder
Leon is a serial entrepreneur with a technical background. He received his Masters in automation at Tsinghua University and joined Oracle shortly thereafter. Prior to Huobi, Leon started two internet startups which failed. He saw the opportunity of bitcoin and cryptocurrency coming and founded Huobi in 2013.
