Who is Bitmain’s co-founders and co-CEOs Micree Zhan and Jihan Wu?

Crypto Tracker
Sep 2, 2018 · 4 min read

Ahead of Bitmain’s rumored $12 billion IPO in the Hong Kong stock market journalists investigated the company’s shareholders structure.

Bitmain was founded by Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan in 2013. The leaked pre-IPO investor decks disclose shares of the owners. Notwithstanding, Micree Zhan, co-founder and co-CEO of Bitmain, is less known, he is the owner of a more significant stake in Bitmain than Wu does. Micree Zhan concentrates on technical issues in Bitmain and owns 36.58% of the company. Jihan Wu owns only 20.5%.

Bitmain seeks to achieve a $14 billion market capitalization after IPO. It would make Zhan’s stake worth at least $5.1 billion and Wu’s stake worth nearly $2.9 billion.

Forbes estimates Zhan’s net worth at around $4 billion and Wu’s at close to $2.3 billion.

Who is Micree Zhan?

Micree Zhan developed the custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chips that have rocketed Bitmain as the largest crypto-mining chip producer. Zhan’s LinkedIn profile has little info and nothing about prior jobs or education.

After graduating from Shandong University with a degree in electrical engineering in 2001, Zhan received a master’s in engineering from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Microelectronics in 2004. He went to work at Tsinghua University as a research and development engineer in the Research Institute of Information Technology.

In 2006, Zhan was a head of research and development and manager of the integrated circuit department at Chinese company Unitend Technologies, which specializes in circuit design. At Unitend, Zhan oversaw the design and development of specific chips for digital television. The shipment volume of these chips exceeded 1 million during his time there. He’s also published numerous papers and patents about circuit chips and helped write the national standard for universal transport interfaces, a protocol used in digital television devices.

In 2010, Zhan founded DivaIP Technologies, a Beijing-based startup to develop TV set-top boxes. He met Wu by chance when the startup was canvassing the streets of Beijing, and Zhan sought advice from Wu regarding funding, Quartz reports. Though Wu was unable to help in that specific regard, the two would meet up again three years later.

Wu and Zhan initially met while Zhan was trying to raise money for the startup, however, after discovering Bitcoin and becoming the first person to translate Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper into Chinese, he approached Zhan for help in developing a new ASIC chip capable of mining bitcoin, at which point Bitmain was founded.

Who is Jihan Wu?

Jihan Wu is a co-founder of Bitmain. In 2018 he was ranked number 3 in Fortune’s The Ledger 40 under 40 for transforming business at the leading edge of finance and technology.

Wu graduated from Peking University in 2009 with a dual degree in economics and psychology. According to his LinkedIn profile, he worked as an investment manager at private equity firm China Grand Prosperity Investment from 2010 to 2013, before he co-founded Bitmain. A co-founder of 8BTC, a China-based Bitcoin forum launched in 2011, Wu is reportedly the first person to translate the bitcoin whitepaper — the original report written by Satoshi Nakamoto that explained the fundamentals of bitcoin — into Mandarin Chinese. He also drew attention to himself in 2016 when he tweeted a vitriolic response to someone who criticized his support for Bitcoin Cash.

About Bitmain Technologies

Bitmain Technologies Ltd., or Bitmain, is a privately owned company headquartered in Beijing, China, with offices in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Chengdu, Hong Kong, Fuzhou, US, Israel, Netherlands, and Switzerland. They are a bitcoin miner and designer of ASIC chips. The company also operates Antpool, historically one of the largest bitcoin mining pools.

Bitmain is Antminer producer. Bitmain’s mining pools controls nearly 51% of the Bitcoin hashrate.

Bitmain is highly profitable; analysts estimated that in 2017 the company generated $3–4 billion in profit. However, the company has been criticised because of its dominance over cryptocurrency mining, a position at odds with the principle of decentralization.

In May 2016, Bitmain made a seed level investment in Wings development, a new platform which aims to bring DAO creation and management to the mainstream by presenting users with a simple UI interface.

In 2017, Bitmain brought in $2.5 billion in revenue predominantly from sales of its cryptocurrency mining equipment, according to the investor decks. In the first quarter of 2018 alone, Bitmain had $1.9 billion in revenue.


Originally published at crypto-tracker.com on September 2, 2018.

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