Text | Mandy Wang Mengdie, Bin Meng
(Author Hu Siqi also contributed to this article)
Overnight, Du Jun became the number one banker in the currency circle.
Du Jun, who travels around the rivers and lakes as the "Founder of Jinse Finance", is crowned as a trinity of underwriters, media, and market makers.
In the second half of 2017, the wind suddenly picked up and leeks were everywhere. The industry needs word of mouth, "he who wins the media wins the world"The statement was praised by many bigwigs. Jinse Finance has taken advantage of the momentum. Until recently, according to the project parties contacted by the author, the package price of a series of articles for a single project has soared to 5 BTC.
The media is at the top of the wave of public opinion, which can be regarded as an "Easy Target". Du Jun's story is packaged as a "reckless story" in which he got on the horse and galloped in the mall in just a few months, full of flavor.
But, in fact, everything happened not in a few months, but in years of ups and downs. Du Jun can't sit firmly in this "village" alone, and the group network with Huobi as the core is far larger and more solid than what people outside the wall see.In the big rivers and lakes of the "currency circle", Huobi Group is indeed a peak, but it is only one of the mountains.
At the same time, there are inextricably intertwined among these mountain tops, marriage-style cross-shareholding, closed-loop layout, and refined water delivery one-stop service.
The currency circle at this time is just like the Spring and Autumn Period. Individuals are ambitious, there are many power contenders, and the wind is turbulent. Each group in the rivers and lakes has different tools and postures for "cutting the leeks", but they will also attack from afar for the common benefit. , the relationship is bound, and resources are shared; at the same time, everyone wants to have the right to speak and occupy the mind of leeks, just like a hundred schools of thought contend.
It's just that the controversy in the Spring and Autumn Period took place in a battle where the masts and sculls were wiped out, and today's controversy took place in the overwhelming WeChat group.
To put it bluntly, everyone took a boat together, and they all had the dream of steering the boat, and it was leeks that carried and capsized the boat.
In this arena that is more exciting than magical reality novels, "the past" such as Li Xiaolai, Lao Mao, and Bao Erye stepped up from the grassroots to the "altar" in the attitude of preachers. Li Xiaolai's projects even had white papers in the crazy period. If you are too lazy to write, you can raise hundreds of millions of yuan in 20 minutes.
"Central players" such as Li Lin, Du Jun, Xu Mingxing, and Zhao Changpeng, with the exchange as the center, set up a series of checkpoints on the water delivery road - the project risked"danger to life"The "hard money" saved by cutting leeks may not have a few steel coins left after going through Huobi's routine.
"Pioneers" such as Chen Weixing, Yuhong, and Wang Feng diss the classical Internet with one hand, and win over new leeks with the influence and tricks accumulated on the classical Internet with the other, striving to "upgrade" quickly.
Waiting for the opportunity to test the entrants" is going forward.
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Timing is fire, accumulation is firewood. Everything was seeded as early as 2013.
If this article is a big drama, it will be subtitled at this moment: five years ago.
In 2013, Bitcoin released version 0.8, which is the most important version in the history of Bitcoin. It improves the internal management of Bitcoin nodes and optimizes network communication. After that, Bitcoin really supported large-scale transactions across the network. The U.S. government recognized its legal status for the first time at the hearing, and the beliefs and ideas of Bitcoin also radiated from the core circle.
The price of the currency soared from more than a dozen dollars to the highest point of more than 1,000 dollars in November, a hundredfold increase.
Chinese people who are sensitive to speculation flooded in. From the middle to the end of 2013, the volume of bitcoin transactions involving renminbi increased significantly. The proportion of renminbi transactions within 6 months soared from 10% of the previous total transaction volume to more than 50%.
Li Xiaolai, who claims to hold 6-figure bitcoins, has been trying to tell the myth of "the richest man in bitcoin", which is a timely stimulant. Many of the audience of the story have become "Lee Methodology""faithful disciples. In the future, Li Xiaolai talked about the way to wealth and freedom on "Get" and it is not surprising that the annual income of the paid knowledge column is as high as 25 million yuan.
In 2013, Garage Coffee was branded as "the birthplace of the currency circle". Li Xiaolai, Bao Erye, Lao Mao, Zhao Dong, Zhao Guofeng, Yi Lihua, Wu Gang, Prince Gong and others who talked and laughed, this is the "half of the country" in the currency circle.
In addition to monopolizing the over-the-counter transactions at the time, these people focused their energy on mining and invested 200 million yuan in the mining machine business of "Roasted Cat", but they lost everything. Roasted cats "evaporated" in 15 years, and "Where did the roasted cats go" is still an unsolved mystery left by the currency circle.
However, it is worth mentioning that in the same year, Wu Jihan founded Bitmain to produce mining machines, and the monthly net profit of the following year reached 200 million yuan. So far, Bitmain itself directly controls about 65% of the total Bitcoin network computing power. Investors include Sequoia, Innovation Works, etc.
Also in 2013, there were two groups of people who did not have wealth and freedom, but were more "foresighted".They saw that mining is actually at the bottom of the interest chain, and the asset model is not monopolistic, so they began to deploy exchanges.
One is Li Lin, Du Jun, Hu Donghai, and Yuan Dawei. They founded Huobi.com. They found Li Xiaolai, but they were not favored. They also met a vote of mainstream classical VC. An investor who met Li Lin at that time recalled : We think it is ridiculous, he said at the time that he would use half of the financing money to hoard coins. However, some people still understood. In November, Dai Zhikang and Zhenge invested in Huobi’s angels, and in March of the following year, Sequoia invested in the Pre-A round.
The second is Xu Mingxing from the former Douding.com. With the help of investor Mai Gang, he obtained angel financing from Jiang Tao, Cai Wensheng, Pre-Angel founder Wang Lijie, and Leifeng.com founder Lin Jun, and founded OKcoin. A few months later, the A-round financing of tens of millions of dollars was completed, and the investors included Ceyuan Venture Capital, Mantu Capital, Venture Workshop, etc.
The ideas of the two are different. Huobi.com is a platform that lends money to users, and the total amount of financing and financing is limited; OKCoin’s financing and financing is P2P, and the interest rate is market-oriented, which also determines to a certain extent. The development path, however, is another story.
Although Huobi and OKcoin filled the gap in the market, because the users and transaction volume at that time were not the same as they are now, and they did not have the "spiritual skills" of education and training. circle.
By the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014, Huobi’s transaction volume was less than 5% of today’s, and OKcoin’s monthly income was only 200,000 yuan, claiming to break even. In an interview with the media, Xu Mingxing also revealed complacently: "I hold nearly 5 million yuan worth of bitcoins, which is enough to buy a house in downtown Beijing."
Compared with the magic story period of getting rich overnight a few years later, it is obviously less attractive.
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If the inflection point of the industry in 2013 belonged to Bitcoin, in 2014, Ethereum was included in the history of digital currency.
In 2014, V God, the 20-year-old founder of Ethereum, knocked on the door of Du Jun’s Beijing office with a poor Chinese translator. After hearing this, Du Jun judged that it was not reliable at all. After that, V God went south and found the later founder of Fenbushi Capital, Shen Bo, and got the investment.
As in history, one group of people never sees the future depicted by the next group of people.
In July 2014, ETH started a 42-day ICO divided into three stages. In the first 14 days, 1 BTC can be exchanged for 2,000 ETH, and one ETH is more than one dollar. At the end of 42 days, a total of more than 30,000 BTC was raised, which shocked the industry.
In the following year, a wave of small-scale ICO projects broke out. WAVES, Lisk, domestic projects Xiaoyi, Lingmengbao, Metaverse, etc. have all successfully ICOed, and a number of blockchain crowdfunding platforms have also emerged, including bnktothefuture abroad, domestic Youbi crowdfunding, Yunbi.com, and ICO365.
However, due to uneven project quality, immature technology, and insufficient user education, the stamina of this outbreak is far less than that of 2017. Projects launched frequently broke, and crowdfunding died midway. To make matters worse, in May 2016, TheDAO (which itself is not a blockchain project), which became the highest crowdfunding case in history with US$150 million, was hacked and lost 3.6 million ether coins.
The base of ordinary users is already weak, and the harsh environment has made the ICO market a hot potato, and many crowdfunding platforms have disappeared. (But please remember the name Yunbi.com) Although the prices of mainstream currencies are generally improving amidst the turmoil, they did not immediately create any myth of wealth. The "currency circle" is still a niche group.
Even during this period, several founders of Huobi, including Li Lin, Du Jun, and Tan Chenhui (later the founder of Coin World), had gone to other markets to look for leeks.
In 2016, they established Caimao Network to provide retail investors with investment and brokerage services in A-shares, US stocks, Hong Kong stocks, gold, foreign exchange, and futures. After the company was listed on the NEEQ, it lost money all the way, and its business has survived in name only. In the first half of 2017, the revenue was only 731,600 yuan, and the net profit attributable to shareholders of the listed company was -9,841,700 yuan. It was not until the end of 2017 when Huobi became the blast center that Li Lin resigned as chairman of the company in which he held 38.27% of the shares.
And these hesitation and depression are just dormancy before the outbreak. The turning point came in 2017, which is still fresh in most people's memory.
Just like Bitcoin, the node that Ethereum has a huge impact on ordinary investors is not the date of birth, butToken EconomyWhen it rises.
Today, most of the tokens on the market are issued based on Ethereum’s ERC20 smart contract. The ERC20 standard was launched in November 2015. By April 2017, the ERC20 standard was transferred to GitHub’s request.
This means that in the state of open source, by copying and pasting the code, a person with a little programming experience can create an ERC20 token in minutes, and it is compatible with the Ethereum wallet, which is fast and low-cost.
Some self-media article titles use this kind of scary title:"Develop Your Own ERC20 Token in Five Minutes"three
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To expand, one of the characteristics of the blockchain is the generation of tokens to obtain code confirmation. Before there is a breakthrough in the application, the lowering of the threshold for issuing coins makes entrepreneurs pay more attention to "issuing coins" than the project itself. This feature of the blockchain is magnified by speculators. There are more coins and more leeks. The legendary "air coins" also appeared.
The story seems to have happened within a few months, but in fact, these people with resources have been ups and downs for many years, and they have accumulated a lot of money.
Whether it is the core group of "Garage Coffee" who once pinned their hopes on mining in Garage Coffee and found that this road is dead, or the small interest circle of Huobi and OKcoin, they all deeply understand that the cost of customer acquisition and user education costs will drop sharply. Opportunity, not to be missed.
And some classical VC investment bosses also entered the market one after another because of the old anxiety of "not being able to miss the trend". This also contributed to the spread of the influence of the currency circle.
A batch of new projects emerged, a batch of traditional projects began to be transformed by the blockchain, a group of technical people in the core group began to work on projects, or further arranged the water delivery link, and a group of people who completed the accumulation of original capital in currency speculation The fund and the entire ecology took shape rapidly.
At that time, it was not uncommon for the currency value to double or even dozens of times a day. As long as the initial public offering is completed, the online transaction will be exploded. Grabbing the shares is a victory. Many ICOs are sold out within ten minutes, and they are real money when they change hands.
Li Xiaolai, who has many disciples, also stood under the spotlight again at this time, in the center of the circle.
I would like to add here that Li Xiaolai’s good partner, Lao Mao, was the one who realized the value of Ethereum earlier. In 2016, he tentatively issued a paid article "What's Behind the Crazy Ethereum". Encourage everyone to "extend the knowledge from Bitcoin to the blockchain and realize the value of ETH", and even predicted that the price of Ethereum would rise to around $400 when the market value of Ethereum ranked outside the top ten.
During this period, investors flocked to the projects he and Lao Mao handled, and it was hard to find a share.
The stories of Li Xiaolai are overwhelming. For example, the ICO of his first platform, which was once called "five billion dollars in air", and EOS, which was also regarded as "the antidote to Ethereum's low TPS", has been turned around several times in saliva, and it is no longer today. Repeatedly.
Talk about the old cat who has a close relationship with Li Xiaolai. He is the head of operations of Yunbi.com, a digital currency exchange, the founder of BCA Club (a "Bitcoin Survival Guide" paid community created by Li Xiaolai in his early years) and a partner of Coin Capital.
Gongxinbao, controlled by Laomao, is the first project that made domestic individual investors realize the amazing wealth-creating effect of ICO. Laomao launched a private placement in the BCA club, designed 250 private placement shares, and each person was limited to invest 2 bitcoins. He said in an interview with the media: "At that time, there were more than 600 people in the group. After I recommended Gongxinbao, 200 people voted within 10 minutes, and the remaining 50 shares were full the next morning.”
The private placement price at that time was calculated at 0.4 yuan. After the public trust stock was launched on Yunbi Online, the price rose to more than 30 yuan at the highest value, and the highest return on investment exceeded 30 times.
This is not an isolated case. At that time, there was a random "meeting of netizens", and no one left for 3 hours. Until Laomao announced that it would screen the list of private placement quotas of HMS and UIP through WeChat grabbing red envelopes, the scene boiled for a while.
At that time, it was Xue Manzi who was crazier than Li Xiaolai.
Li Xiaolai once worked with Xue Manzi on such a magical currency as MLGB. In the white paper, the project is described as "a grass-mud horse-based artificial intelligence agent", and the token distribution reads "purchase a live grass-mud horse as a pet". Just such a project easily raised 15 million yuan.
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As we all know, the magic reality period of the above-mentioned ICO ended on September 4, 2017.
PressOne and BigOne, which Li Xiaolai raised hundreds of millions of dollars, have withdrawn their tokens successively.Yunbi.com, which was originally scheduled to be listed on NASDAQ on October 24, ended its mission as a digital currency exchange.The old cat went to Japan.
People familiar with the matter said that Li Xiaolai dumped a large amount of BTC at what he thought was a high point, but failed to buy it back. The capital lost a hole, and the one-year cycle of the fund was stretched to two years.
Bao Erye also recorded a video and bluntly said that Li Xiaolai was not kind. Li Xiaolai's project was refunded after a few months, but it was based on the currency price at that time.
Although "Bitcoin's richest man" still has a well-received status in the circle today, I am afraid that the outsiders have done it.
The stagnation and reshuffle this time has changed the way of "sit in the bank" and provided dividends for several waves of people to make a fortune.
beforeArbitrary saving projects + big boss brainwashing platform + crowdfunding websiteThe grass-roots team doesn't work anymore.The credibility and user experience of the exchange, the project teamAt the same time, as mentioned at the beginning of the article, when leeks have been cut repeatedly and information transparency is desired, the media has also become a battleground for military strategists.
And this time, those who have the right to speak in the currency circle, one is Huobi and OKCoin, which has long been strong, but not too high-profile and crazy; the other is Zhao Changpeng, who ranked third in Forbes in half a year, and his Binance.
Although the business of Huobi has stagnated for a period of time, it has been recognized by many investors as a"Regular platform implicated", beneficial to the brand - although Huobi is also a beneficiary of the crazy ICO and currency price surge, and its transaction volume and depth have long been ranked first in the world, but even in the period when leeks are everywhere, Huobi's currency listing mechanism It can still be regarded as rigorous, only trading the mainstream currencies, and did not cause "a fishy body".
At the same time, the ecological layout of Huobi is very complete, and the context is extending day by day, with "Huobi Army" stationed at every joint.
image description
IOST and DATA——Two Controversial Zhenge Projects
At the same time, Huobi released the ERC20-based Huobi Points HT Token. The points serve the Hadax voting mechanism, and each vote needs to pay 0.1HT. However, because of such a voting mechanism, the original "unspoken rule listing fee" of 2 million US dollars was directly "marketized", and the total cost of the first championship EGCC vote was more than 47 million yuan, which is already sky-high.
This mechanism caused some media to stand up and criticize, and also caused some projects that had been queuing up to be listed to complain, thinking that this move "bad coins drive out good coins". Soon after, Huobi announced the reform of Hadax, and joined the "Super Node" voting in the second phase.
The rules of super nodes are: there are 1 million HT in the guaranteed account. 1. Projects nominated by super voting nodes will be given priority in the preliminary review of HADAX projects; 2. Super voting nodes can vote and comment on the preliminary review projects, and votes do not need to pay HT; projects supported by 100% super voting nodes will directly enter the Huobi Pro meeting Review process.
At present, 15 investment institutions including Bitmain, ZhenFund, Link Capital, Genesis Capital, Danhua Capital, and Deding Innovation Fund have become super nodes——Extraordinarily obvious resource transfer and interest binding.image description
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Part of the capital of the mainstream currency circle of "non-super nodes"
In addition, at the end of 2016, Du Jun established Jinse Finance, and in 2017, Tan Chenhui established Coin World's main attack newsletter, forming a linkage in the media field.
Yuan Dawei, another co-founder of Huobi, and Sun Zeyu, a shareholder of Huobi, created the Kushen cold wallet to meet the needs of large users.
Huobi has not let go of various refined water delivery services, such as investing in a company called Yuming.com, do not underestimate the domain name, Du Jun earned the original capital by flipping the domain name, how important is the domain name in the currency circle - called BAT On the first day of the currency, it rose by 800%. A domain name is worth millions or even tens of millions of RMB. Huobi also has a position that sounds absurd as a domain name specialist; another example is that Huobi recently invested in a company called WXY Blockchain World" Ogilvy & Mather”, providing consulting + marketing services for the project.
All in all, Huobi has been on the road of delivering water throughout the project’s life cycle.
I have been looking forward to the project of landing on the exchange to cut leeks. Before that, I have to give away the head myself, and Huobi and his partners have cut a big closed loop.
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If it is said that Huobi has accumulated a lot of money in the early years, it is Binance that really rises in the "time".
The story of "Time makes heroes" is envied by many practitioners. Today, exchanges that rank outside the top 100 and only have a few BTC liquidity a day are still dreaming of "the next regulation is an opportunity to rise".
There are several reasons for Binance’s meteoric rise.
One is that its listing standards were once very low. When there were not so many competitors, Binance quickly expanded its currency types and launched many "cottage coins". Just like customers, even though breakouts and running away happen from time to time, Binance has reaped bonuses.
The second is that before the regulation became stricter, the RMB transaction volume of digital currency accounted for more than 80%, but after September 4, the main position of the transaction was transferred to Japan. At the end of October 2017, Japan’s transaction volume accounted for more than 60% of the world’s total. . Prior to this, Binance had already focused its team and layout on Japan with great foresight.
The third is that Zhao Changpeng, who was born as the CTO of OKCoin, has made Binance recognized in terms of technology and user experience, and the operational skills of his partner "the first sister of the currency circle" He Yi cannot be underestimated.
In the currency circle, there are many long-term interests, and few potential conflicts. Zhao Changpeng and Xu Mingxing are considered a pair.
Xu Mingxing once said that Zhao Changpeng was fired for falsifying his resume; Zhao Changpeng said that OKCoin’s cold wallet has security problems. Xu Mingxing is the only person who holds the private key of his cold wallet, and he also publicly encourages company employees to trade on his own platform.
The war of words between the two went back and forth for several rounds. Just recently, a foreign author published an article on Medium. He concluded through public data analysis that OKex, the world’s largest trading volume, has fraudulent trading volume. And 93% of the transaction volume is false transactions. Changpeng Zhao forwarded this article and called it a "very good in-depth analysis".
OKEx responded to this. OKEx has many quantitative trading and derivatives hedging users, and there are many programmatic transactions; at the same time, it is a normal user habit that customers are active during the daytime and relatively low at night. Disdain to do any so-called fake data.
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After the Lunar New Year in 2018, it was the latest time that the ecosystem of the currency circle was disturbed on a large scale.
In January 2018, on the eve of the Chinese New Year, the author interviewed a senior "agent investment" in the currency circle. He was frustrated with the market at the time: the market could not be pulled, there were no good projects, leeks were too calm, and there was a pool of stagnant water.
Just when the "big brothers" were anxious day and night, the three o'clock group was born. Yuhong, chairman of Funyou Group, and the founders of several blockchain projects he incubated and invested in are the real initiators of the three o'clock group that emphasizes "consensus" and takes turns as group leaders.
In addition to Chen Weixing, Cai Wensheng, and Wang Feng, who joined the three o'clock main group earlier, their views were shared by the media in the future, as well as VC partners such as Xu Xiaoping, Wu Shichun, Wang Huadong, Qiu Hao, Zhu Huaiyang, Sun Zeyu, and the legendary three-year-old The 2.9 billion legendary Da Kongyi and other big bulls in the currency circle, Shuai Chu, the founder of Quantum Chain, Zhang Shousong, the chairman of Caimao Network, and Cai Yuedong, the uncle of the same way, and so on.
Everyone was anxiously imagining the future world constructed by the blockchain, talking about the economic foundation, sharing non-stop from morning to night, "the density of opinions is high, and the gold content is high", commented by a person in the currency circle who joined the group early.
Turning on the lights all night to debate relieved the anxiety of the entire circle, and also saved a group of self-media in the currency circle who had no choice but to choose a topic, and even gave birth to a new self-media. On the third day of the new year, the media group was established at three o'clock, and the chat records were continuously supplied. The work of the media has never been so easy.
Chen Weixing's anger at Zhu Xiaohu pushed this wave of public opinion to a climax.
Yuhong doesn't mind other people using the name "Three O'Clock". Soon, the group of "Three O'Clock Named Series" split up and down like crazy. All of a sudden, everyone realized how to hold a leek——Do community.
Among them, the loudest ones were the "Three O'clock Mars Finance and Economics Group" and "Wang Feng Ten Questions".
Wang Feng asked Li Xiaolai, Chen Weixing, Xue Manzi, Yang Ning, Zhu Xiaohu... the word Wang Feng instantly became the brand logo of blockchain dry goods, which is much more recognized than the Mars Finance he founded.
In early March, according to media reports, the management of Linekong Interactive (HK.8267) announced at an internal meeting that it will fully embrace the blockchain, and its games, hardware, and film and television IP businesses will also be fully chained.
The losses in the first three quarters of 2017 were RMB 12.6 million, RMB 50.36 million, and RMB 110 million respectively. Linekong has not had a hit game for a long time, and new business growth is weak. "Comprehensive embrace" is generally believed in the industry to reverse the trend of losses. It is nothing new for listed companies to pin their hopes on the blockchain.
Interestingly, a former Linekong employee interviewed by the author said that Wang Feng, who came out of Jinshan, has always liked to compete with Lei Jun.
Recently, there have been rumors that Xiaomi is going to enter the blockchain field. The recruitment website shows that Xiaomi is recruiting senior blockchain development engineers and server development engineers with high salaries. The link of Xiaomi’s blockchain game product "Encryption Rabbit" has also been exposed on the Internet. . Moreover, Xiaomi has fully taken over Xunlei's colleague meeting at the end of last year.
And Chen Weixing, who is rushing on the wave, is always labeled as an "outsider" by the onlookers because of his identity as the founder of Kuai. In fact, although he has no actual project in hand and entered the market a little late, Chen Weixing does have a lot of ecological layout.
He is not only an angel investor in Binance, but also invested in Huobi and recently acquired more shares; in terms of projects, he invested in Xiaoyi and Quantum Chain; in terms of media, he invested in Babbitt and Mars Finance.
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Recently, the momentum of the word blockchain seems to have weakened a bit, especially after the overall sharp drop in the early morning of March 7.
That night, Binance was unable to withdraw cash, and all mainstream digital currencies plummeted. Except for VIA, which was blown up, it rose by more than 11,000% compared with the lowest point in 24H. Although Binance has repeatedly explained "not stolen" in the official group and other places. But logically speaking, hackers can create empty orders on other exchanges, and when the currency value falls, they can harvest and leave the market on other platforms without having to withdraw the currency at all.
This point has already been reported by many media at night, and the subsequent self-media has even added fuel and vinegar, describing the story of "guarding and stealing" vividly.
The three o'clock group, which has always been lively and fond of "over-analysis", faced this matter with harmony. facing He Yi"Not a single coin was lost"Pale explanation, swiping the screen to cheer for Binance.
The tit-for-tat high and low arguments on weekdays overlapped into one voice at this time.
From 12:00 yesterday to 10:00 today, the total market value of digital currencies broke a new low again, from 376 billion US dollars to 316 billion US dollars, and the total market value shrank by 60 billion US dollars in one day.
There are fewer people talking about blockchain in the circle of friends.
In the currency circle, there is no eternal enemy. At the lively node, everyone rushes to build momentum; at the fragile moment, everyone tacitly stabilizes the market.
Interestingly, unlike classical Internet investment which is done on paper and according to the rules, most of the investment behavior in the currency circle is the original "oral agreement". .
And this consensus is and will always be just the word interest.
(In addition, there are too many details of the magical stories and branches to present one by one. Interested readers, please leave a message or add WeChat diediebuxiu002, indicating the name-company-intention)
