Jihan Wu

Wu was born in 1986 in Chongqing, China. After graduating from Chongqing Nankai Secondary School, he entered Peking University, earning dual degrees in economics and psychology in 2009.

After graduating from university, Wu worked as a financial analyst for a private equity firm. In May 2011, he discovered Bitcoin and raised 100,000 yuan (US$15,373 as of 2011) from family and friends to purchase 900 bitcoins. He and fellow Bitcoin enthusiast Chang Jia (长铗) founded Babite (巴比特), China's first Bitcoin community site. In late 2011, he was the first to translate Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin white paper into Chinese.

In 2012, with cofounder Friedcat (烤猫) Wu invested in the bitcoin mining company ASICMINER, one of the first companies to produce application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) used to mine Bitcoin worldwide. Although initially successful with more than a thousand times of investment return given to its investors, Friedcat later ran into technical difficulties and exited the business. Wu also lost his investment purchasing hardware from another mining hardware company, Canaan Creative.

Wealth

In Hurun Report's inaugural Blockchain Rich List 2018, Wu was named the second richest cryptocurrency entrepreneur in China, with an estimated net worth of 16.5 billion yuan (US$2.39 billion), behind only Micree Zhan. Hurun also ranked him as the 204th richest person in China. In the same year, he was ranked No. 3 in Fortune's The Ledger 40 under 40, for transforming business at the leading edge of finance and technology.

Wu is a citizen of Singapore, and lived in Singapore as of 2024.