Li Lin, The Founder of Huobi — — 10 Years of Ambition
On August 27, 2018, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange showed that the major shareholder of the listed company Tongcheng transferred 70% of his shares to Li Lin, chairman of Huobi. After the completion of the transfer, Huobi became the actual controller of Tongcheng. The appearance of this news made the Huobi Token (HT) rise by nearly 5% within five minutes. And HT’s 10.44% increase throughout the day is also significantly stronger than other exchange platform coins. Listed on the backdoor? HT will fly? When preparing to let go, why did the founder of Huobi, Li Lin, choose to enter the capital market. This may be related to his dull family environment and extraordinary ambitions.
Who is Li Lin? He is the founder of one of the three major exchanges in China and the world’s leading digital currency trading platform, Huobi. He abandoned the work of hundreds of thousands annual salary, continued to start a business, and constantly challenged. He said, “By 2019, no matter what the Huobi network will be, I will let go. Entrepreneurship for 10 years is enough, life does not regret. Ma Yun’s ambition is too big. In the next decade, I want to experience other lives. Li Lin claims to have no ambitions of Ma Yun. Is he really such a person?
Life is dull, his heart fluctuates
Living in an ordinary family, Li Lin respects her mother and takes care of her younger brother. Like other traditional Chinese families, he lived a simple and happy life.
Like every science and engineering boy in China, Tsinghua is the school that Li Lin dreams of. In 2005, he spent four months reviewing and became the postgraduate students of Tsinghua University. He completed the Tsinghua graduate program in two years.
In 2007, after graduating from Tsinghua University, Li Lin started to work for Oracle. The contrast between dull white-collar life and the success of social media such as Facebook and Renren disturbed his life trajectory, as a result, his ambitions began to sprout.
Repeated defeats, repeated fights
In 2007, Li Lin founded the social network “Friendship Network”. Due to funding problems, the company came to an end in less than a year because they could not establish a suitable profit model. In 2010, the domestic group buying website became popular. “Group purchase navigation” came into being. Summarizing the lessons of the last failure of entrepreneurship, Li Lin founded the Renrenzhe company in June. Just one month later, the website started to earn revenue. And after two months, the number of website users rose sharply. After that, Renrenzhe was ranked as the second largest independent group buying navigation website in China. However, as the popularity of group buying industry slowly dwindled, Renrenzhe eventually ended in failure.
With two ventures, two losses and two experiences, Li Lin continues to embark on the third road of entrepreneurship, looking for direction once again. In 2013, the price of bitcoin fluctuated greatly and attracted a group of speculators. The transactions of cryptocurrency naturally generate the demand of exchanges. In the bitcoin market, operating a bitcoin trading website is seen as a “stable profit”. As a careerist, how can Li Lin miss this opportunity? Consequently, in September 2013, the Huobi Exchange was officially launched.
A careerist’s expansion map
The pace of the entrepreneur is always fast. In 2013, Li Lin made a major decision that the transaction on the Huobi platform is permanently exempt from handling fees, which allows the sales of Huobi to reach 10 million yuan a month. However, the good times did not last long. In February 2014, Mt.Gox, the world’s largest bitcoin trading platform, was hacked, and 740,000 bitcoins disappeared in the virtual world. The insolvency led to the collapse of Mt.Gox. This has caused a certain panic in the exchange industry. At the same time, the entire industry in 2014 was shrouded in a downturn.
However, enterpreneurs cannot be stopped the aggression due to the blow of the industry. In 2015, Li Lin published “The Current Development Status and Policy Research of the Bitcoin Industry”. He hoped that this would promote industry regulation and bring bitcoin transactions into the regulatory arena, thus legalizing bitcoin transactions.
But fate always makes people. In January 2016, the police announced that e-rental illegally raised more than 50 billion yuan. With the e-rental problem erupting, in the field of Internet finance, regulatory policies have become stricter. The Bitcoin trading platform did not escape the rectification storm, and the central bank took the lead in starting the cleanup and rectification of Bitcoin trading platforms. Therefore, the idea of legalizing the Bitcoin trading platform was completely defeated.
Frustration can’t beat ambitious people. In October 2017, Huobi Pro, a professional trading platform for the global currency, was launched. Li Lin began to separate the trading of the trading platform from domestic regulation. Since then, Li Lin has completely abandoned the burden in the digital currency field. Without the restraint of supervision, it seems that he no longer has to be scared. Li Lin began to run with his ambitions.
On April 24, 2018, Li Lin led Huobi to participate in the election of the EOS supernode. The FHuobi Global Eco-Fund, a subsidiary of the Huobi Group, has established an EOS Eco-Special Fund to participate in the incubation of EOS-based projects. Huobi provides all-round support for funds, resources, technology, and operations, providing more vitality to the EOS ecosystem. According to the official report of Huobi, the EOS Eco-Special Fund also focuses on the GM Global HT, which will help the EOS community to build a benign ecosystem. At the 18:34 on May 2, the latest 8th SuperNode campaign list was announced. The Huobi global was ranked as the first echelon with the “hexathlon”. On July 3, Huobi later jumped to the first position. And for a long time, it has not fallen out of the first echelon. This undoubtedly gave Li Lin a platform to show his ambitions.
On June 6, 2018, Li Lin led Huobi to officially launch the blockchain financial public chain plan, covering from the expansion of the exchange to the diversified ecology of the blockchain. Currently, the project is openly campaigning for technology leaders. It will continue to complete the white paper and implement the technology, carry out ecological construction, and complete the main online line and officially release it.
10 years and then give up? No, this is not Li Lin. In August 2018, Li Lin led Huobi to backdoor listing. This allows us to see another ambition of Li Lin. He is no longer satisfied with the identity of a businessman who is merely creating a digital currency trading platform but to completely overturn the old financial order. If Nakamoto is only an attempt to “have a non-state currency”, then Li Lin expects to replace Nakamoto and become a loyal practitioner of Hayek, instead of surviving in the clash.
