Jihan Wu

Jihan Wu is the co-founder of Bitmain, a multinational semiconductor company that is a major manufacturer of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chips used to mine bitcoin and a variety of other cryptocurrencies.

Through Bitmain, Wu oversees mining pools ConnectBTC, and the two historically largest bitcoin mining pools by computing power, BTC.com and AntPool. Additionally, Wu has had notable disagreements with Bitcoin Core developers, been outspoken against bitcoin’s implementation of the Segregated Witness soft fork, and has promoted bitcoin cash to miners and the wider crypto community. In 2018 he was named third on Fortune’s The Ledger 40 under 40 list.

In 2018, it was reported Wu had been ousted from the board of BitMain Technologies Holding Company, but a Bitmain representative denied the report when contacted. In 2019 the South China Morning Post reported Wu and co-founder Mircree Zhan would take on a reduced role at Bitmain.

Later that year, the company named its director of product engineering, Haichao Wang, as its new CEO and said Wu and Zhan would continue to be involved as directors.

However, according to a filing the Cayman Islands–incorporated holding company submitted Dec. 10, 2019, Zhan’s role as a board director was “ceased” on Oct. 30. That was one day after Jihan Wu returned to the company’s Beijing office. Wu took over Zhan’s roles at the Beijing operating subsidiary as a director and legal representative as of Oct. 28. Wu appeared on stage at a customer event as Bitmain’s CEO and chairman in December 2019.