Author: Lin Wanwan, Beating
Original title: Starting with Manus Xiao Hong, the CryptoInterns at the Table
On the last day of 2025, the biggest news in the tech world came from Meta : Zuckerberg spent billions of dollars to acquire Manus, an AI company that was less than a year old. This is Meta's third-largest acquisition in history, after WhatsApp and Scale AI.
A few days after the news was released, people discovered that his self-introduction stated: BTC Holder.
A tweet appeared on Twitter. The person who posted the tweet used the online name "Shenyu," whose real name is Mao Shixing. He is one of the earliest Bitcoin miners in China, and his net worth is already over 10 billion yuan.
"It's not surprising that Manus founder Xiao Hong is a BTC holder—he was one of the interns we recruited at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2013, and we worked together on 1BTC back then."
2013. OneBit. Huazhong University of Science and Technology intern.
Xiao Hong, born in 1993, hails from a small town in Ji'an, Jiangxi Province. Before becoming the Vice President of Meta, he was best known as the founder of AI products Monica and Manus. But few people know that his first serious internship was at a Bitcoin media company called Yibit.
That year, he was a sophomore at Huazhong University of Science and Technology's Qiming College, working on various student projects, such as WeChat's "message in a bottle" feature, WeChat wall displays, and a campus secondhand trading platform. As the vice-captain of the co-founding team, he was already considered a well-known tech geek among his peers. But Bitcoin was still a completely new world for him.
1Bit is one of the earliest Bitcoin-focused media outlets in China, with its offices located in Galaxy SOHO, Beijing. The founding team includes Shenyu and several other young idealists whose work is simple: translating foreign Bitcoin news, writing popular science articles, and trying to help more Chinese people understand this new phenomenon, which was then labeled a "Ponzi scheme" by mainstream media.
It's difficult to verify exactly what Xiao Hong did at 1bit. But looking back twelve years later, the significance of this experience has long surpassed that of an internship.
The Bitcoin community in 2013 was an early participant club of a large-scale social experiment. There was no regulation, no pricing anchor, no mature business model—just a group of young people who believed "code is law," huddling together for warmth amidst mainstream ridicule. Those who entered at that time were either gamblers or genuinely understood something.
Xiao Hong clearly belongs to the latter category. Decentralization, permissionlessness, and code autonomy. These ideas seemed like geeky self-indulgence at the time, but they constituted a fundamental framework for understanding the world. Twelve years later, when AI begins to reshape the boundaries of human-computer interaction, this framework may become more traceable.
From Bitcoin to AI Agents, the technological forms are vastly different, but the underlying logic remains the same: they are all about how to enable machines to operate autonomously, how to establish collaboration in distrustful environments, and how to replace intermediaries with code. Those who understood Bitcoin in 2013 will need almost no additional cognitive input to understand AI Agents in 2025.
In that tweet, Shenyu used the term "identification vector".
"In the past decade, from Bitcoin to AI agents, times have changed, and the boundaries of companies are blurring. It's less about hiring employees and more about identifying vectors..."
What is a vector? Direction multiplied by velocity. In 2013, Xiao Hong was a sophomore willing to bet his time on "unreliable" fields. This choice itself was a form of screening—filtering out those who only looked at immediate certainty and leaving those who were willing to pay for long-term possibilities.
Twelve years later, this vector pointed to the position of Vice President of Meta.
In the cryptocurrency industry, where get-rich-quick schemes and overnight losses coexist, there is a hidden path to success: in your early twenties, follow the right person. Around 2013, a group of the smartest and most daring young people flooded into this wildly growing world. Some had just dropped out of school, some hadn't even graduated yet, and they followed the most audacious entrepreneurs of the era, taking entry-level jobs in trading platforms, mining pools, and media companies.
They were betting on a certain kind of understanding. This understanding allowed them to identify opportunities faster than their peers in every technological wave that followed a decade later.
As Warren Buffett once said, "Life is like a snowball rolling downhill. The important thing is to find wet snow and a long hill."
The cryptocurrency industry in 2013 was like a long, wet slope. And those who stepped onto that slope in their early twenties have had their snowballs rolling for twelve years.
Xiao Hong was one of them. But he wasn't the only one.
An intern on a shareholding chart
One day in 2013, in an office building in Zhongguancun, Beijing, two young people were discussing something crazy.
Wu Jihan, 27, holds a double degree in psychology and economics from Peking University. He recently left a venture capital firm and has been investing in and advocating for Bitcoin for the past two years. His Chinese translation of Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper remains the most widely circulated version to this day.
The person sitting opposite him was Zhan Ketuan, 34 years old. He graduated from Shandong University with a bachelor's degree and from the Institute of Microelectronics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences with a master's degree. He has more than ten years of experience in integrated circuit development and is a recognized chip design expert in the industry.
But this story has a third protagonist.
Ge Yuesheng, 21 years old, graduated from Huzhou University a year ago. Before joining Bitmain, he and Jihan Wu were colleagues at a private equity fund in Shanghai, where he was an intern and both worked in investment analysis. Under Jihan Wu's influence, Ge Yuesheng began to get involved with Bitcoin.
Of the three, Ge Yuesheng was the least noticeable. He had neither Wu Jihan's industry insight nor Zhan Ketuan's technical background.
But he had one thing: money. More precisely, the resources of the family business—capital, mines, and electricity.
At the time, neither Wu Jihan nor Zhan Ketuan had much money. According to a former Bitmain executive, the Ge Yuesheng family invested heavily in the early stages, with several family members becoming shareholders. Wu Jihan's decision to found Bitmain was largely due to the investment and assistance of Ge Yuesheng; this intern can be considered Bitmain's earliest angel investor.
The division of labor among the three was very clear: Wu Jihan was responsible for industry judgment and market analysis, Zhan Ketuan was responsible for chip research and development, and Ge Yuesheng provided funding and resources.
In an effort to persuade Zhan Ketuan to join the company, Wu Jihan offered an astonishing deal: Zhan Ketuan would not take a salary, but if he could develop an ASIC chip that could efficiently run Bitcoin's encryption algorithm in the shortest possible time, he would receive 60% of the company's shares.
Jihan Wu developed the 55nm Bitcoin mining chip BM1380 and the first-generation Antminer based on this chip in just six months.
In October 2013, Beijing Bitmain Technology Co., Ltd. was officially established. According to business registration information, in the earliest shareholder structure, Jihan Wu held 59.2% of the shares, Ge Yuesheng held 28% of the shares, and Wu Jihan's name was not even on the list of founding shareholders at that time.
This detail has been repeatedly analyzed since then. Why was Ge Yuesheng, at the age of 21, able to acquire 28% of the shares?
In 2013, Bitcoin was far from being mainstream. In April of that year, the price of Bitcoin broke through $100 for the first time; in November, it surged to over $1,000; then in December, the price halved, beginning a two-year bear market.
Most people rush in when prices are soaring and flee when prices plummet. There are many wealthy people, but Ge Yuesheng chose to enter the industry in its earliest and most chaotic stages, and tied himself to that boat.
This requires not only money, but also a certain intuition about trends and the courage to bet in the face of uncertainty.
The rest of the story is well-known: in less than five years, these three individuals transformed Bitmain into the world's largest mining machine company, at its peak controlling over 70% of the global Bitcoin hashrate and reaching a valuation of $15 billion. In the 2018 Hurun Blockchain Rich List, Wu Jihan became the "new richest self-made man born in the 1980s" with a net worth of 16.5 billion yuan, while Ge Yuesheng became the "new richest man born in the 1990s" with a net worth of 3.4 billion yuan.
In 2019, Ge Yuesheng left Bitmain with Jihan Wu to co-found Matrixport. Ge Yuesheng became the CEO of Matrixport and has remained in that position ever since.
A 27-year-old evangelist, a 34-year-old tech genius, and a 21-year-old intern angel investor were bound together by the same vision at the right time.
The first cohort of students at "OKCoin's Whampoa Military Academy"
If Ge Yuesheng's story is a classic example of an intern becoming a co-founder, then the following story shows another possibility: from the first employee to being acquired at a high price by the former employer's competitor.
One day in 2013, a young engineer named Wang Hui walked into an office in a Beijing office building.
The office was small and simply furnished, looking more like a makeshift base for a startup. A whiteboard hung on the wall, covered with system architecture diagrams and flowcharts. Several tables were pushed together, seating fewer than ten people.
This is all of OKCoin's assets.
Founder Star Xu was struggling to find talent. At that time, Bitcoin was still a gray area in China, and mainstream media reports either portrayed it as a Ponzi scheme or a "money laundering tool." Engineers willing to give up offers from top companies to join a "crypto trading company" were almost impossible to find.
Wang Hui was the first person willing to take the risk.
As OKCoin's first employee, he needed to build the entire technical architecture from scratch. There were no ready-made solutions to copy, no mature open-source projects to use, and even very few competing products to refer to. Everything was a blank slate.
This presents a huge challenge, but also a huge opportunity: if he can make it happen, he will become one of the most technically savvy people in the industry.
Over two years, Wang Hui almost single-handedly built OKCoin's core trading system. The performance of that matching engine was, at the time, absolutely dominant in the industry. "Many trading platforms couldn't even handle basic concurrency," he later recalled, "they would crash if even a few people traded simultaneously."
More importantly, he trained the entire technical team from scratch. Many of the core technical personnel at OKCoin (and later renamed OKEx and OKX) were trained by him.
But in 2016, Wang Hui chose to leave.
There are many rumors circulating in the industry about the reasons for his departure: disagreements with the founder, internal factional struggles, dissatisfaction with the company's direction... Wang Hui himself has never publicly responded to these claims.
But one thing is certain: he took all the experience and connections he had built at OKCoin with him.
His first stop after leaving was a brief collaboration with another former OKCoin executive. That person was CZ, who later founded Binance and became the world's richest person in the cryptocurrency world.
In early 2018, Wang Hui and two former colleagues founded JEX to trade cryptocurrency options. The timing was crucial. In January 2018, the price of Bitcoin had just plummeted from its all-time high of $20,000, leaving the entire industry in dire straits. Most people were fleeing the market, but Wang Hui chose to enter against the trend.
JEX received investments from Huobi and Jinse Finance. Just one year later, in 2019, Binance announced its full acquisition of JEX, with the transaction reportedly amounting to hundreds of millions of RMB.
This is a rather dramatic ending: OKCoin's first employee founded a company that was acquired by Binance.
After going around in circles, all these people came from the same place.
Therefore, a saying still circulates in the crypto: OKCoin is the "Whampoa Military Academy of the cryptocurrency industry".
Vectors, windows, and survivors
Now, let's go back to Xiao Hong.
In 2013, he was just a sophomore interning at Yibit. This internship probably only occupies a small part of his resume—after all, his main focus later became WeChat ecosystem entrepreneurship: Yiban, Weiban, Nightingale Technology, which was eventually sold to Minglue Technology.
But some things do leave traces.
Xiao Hong introduces himself as a "BTC Holder." This means that he has maintained his attention to and participation in cryptocurrencies since 2013. In a market where prices fluctuate by hundreds of times, being able to hold on for twelve years is a skill in itself, or rather, a belief.
More importantly, his brief internship in 2013 may have shaped his methodology: not pursuing disruptive technological breakthroughs from scratch, but rather being adept at finding gaps in existing large platforms and creating value through product capabilities.
From Yibit to Yiban and Weiban in the WeChat ecosystem, then to the AI browser plugin Monica, and finally to the general AI Manus, the underlying logic of this path may be the same: find a large platform that is experiencing explosive growth, and make the best tool on that platform.
The stories of these three interns reveal some common patterns:
First, timing is more important than effort. They all entered the cryptocurrency industry between 2013 and 2017. That was the industry's "chaotic period." Early enough that most people weren't even aware of the opportunity; but not too early, before the infrastructure was even fully established. Those who entered during this window of opportunity gained disproportionately much more growth. By 2020, the industry had matured considerably, making it much more difficult for newcomers to replicate the same path.
Secondly, choosing who to follow is more important than choosing what to do. Ge Yuesheng followed Wu Jihan, Wang Hui followed Star Xu, and Xiao Hong followed Shenyu. These bigwigs may not be the most famous, but they were among the most discerning and capable people at the time.
The benefits of following the right people go beyond just learning things; more importantly, it allows you to enter a high-quality network. Wang Hui's ability to quickly secure investment and be acquired by Binance after leaving OKCoin was largely due to the reputation and connections he had built within the industry.
Third, the ability to bet in the face of uncertainty is scarce. Joining a Bitcoin company in 2013, sticking with a DEX project during a bear market in 2018, and giving up a stable job to start a business in 2020—these choices all seemed risky at the time.
But risk and reward are symmetrical. Those who are willing to accept uncertainty ultimately receive rewards commensurate with the risks they take.
Of course, these are all stories of survivorship bias.
Most of the young people who entered the crypto around 2013 did not become millionaires. Many of them left during the bear market, miss the pump on the bull market, and went from zero to nothing during the wild fluctuations. But this doesn't prevent us from extracting valuable lessons from the stories of the survivors.
On the last day of 2025, Xiao Hong tweeted: "To make good products in a global market, there are many troubles that don't come from the business itself or the user value itself. But it's all worth it."
From an intern at 1bit in 2013 to the Vice President of Meta in 2025, Xiao Hong took 12 years.
In the past 12 years, his former boss, Shenyu, went from a 23-year-old graduate student who dropped out to start a business to an industry tycoon with a net worth of billions. Shenyu's former partner, Wu Jihan, went from an evangelist to the creator of a mining empire, only to leave in internal strife, start a new business, and rise again.
The pace of this industry is too fast. It takes almost ten years for someone to transform from an intern to a billionaire, and it takes almost ten years for a giant to fall from the peak and then rise again.
So treat every intern around you well. Because you never know who you'll need to treat to dinner ten years from now.
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