Manus Xiao Hong, with that group of interns in the coin industry who “came to the table”
Author: Lin Wanwan, Dongtsa Beating
Original title: Starting with Manus Xiao Hong, those coin industry interns
On the last day of 2025, the biggest news in tech came from Meta: Zuckerberg spent billions of dollars to buy Manus, an AI company 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 announced, everyone found that his profile stated: BTC Holder (Bitcoin holder).
A tweet appeared on Twitter. The person who tweeted it is called “Kamiyu”. His real name is Mao World Bank. He is one of the earliest Bitcoin miners in China. His net worth is already over 10 billion dollars:
“Manus founder Xiao Hong is a BTC holder, which is no surprise — he was one of our interns at Huake in 2013, and we worked together on 1bit.”
2013. One bit. Huake intern.
Xiao Hong, born in '93, is from the small town of Ji'an, Jiangxi. Prior to becoming Meta's vice president, 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 OneBit.
He was in his sophomore year that year and worked on various student programs at the Qiming College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, WeChat drift bottles, WeChat on the wall, and a second-hand trading platform on campus. The vice-captain of the Lianchuang team is already considered a well-known tech geek among his peers. But Bitcoin is still a whole new world for him.
One Bit is one of the earliest vertical Bitcoin media in China. Its office is located in Beijing Galaxy SOHO. The founding team included Kamiyu and several similarly young idealists. What they did was simple: translate foreign Bitcoin information, write popular science articles, and try to make more Chinese people understand this new thing called the “Ponzi scheme” by mainstream media at the time.
What exactly did Xiao Hong do in Yibit is already difficult to verify. But looking back 12 years later, the significance of this experience has long surpassed the internship itself.
The Bitcoin Circle in 2013 was a club of early participants in a major social experiment. There is no regulation, no pricing anchor, no mature business model — just a group of young people who believe “code is the law” to warm up amidst the ridicule of mainstream society. The people who were able to enter at that time were either gamblers or really understood something.
Xiao Hong clearly falls into the latter category. Decentralized, permissionless, code autonomy. These ideas seemed like geek pride at the time, but they formed an underlying framework for understanding the world. Twelve years from now, when AI begins to reshape the boundaries of human-computer interaction, this framework may become traceable.
From Bitcoin to AI Agents, the forms of technology vary widely, but the underlying logic is the same: it's all about how to make machines run autonomously, how to establish collaboration in an untrustworthy environment, and how to replace intermediaries with code. People who understood Bitcoin in 2013 understood AI Agents hardly needed additional cognitive purchasing in 2025.
In that tweet, Kamiyu used a word: “identify vectors.”
“In ten years, from Bitcoin to AI Agents, times have changed, and the company's boundaries have blurred. It's not so much about recruiting employees as it is about identifying vectors...”
What is a vector? Direction multiplied by speed. Xiao Hong in 2013 is a sophomore who is willing to bet his time on “unreliable” fields. The choice itself is a screening — sifting out those who only look at immediate certainty, leaving behind those willing to pay for long-term possibilities.
Twelve years later, this vector points to the position of Meta's vice president.
In the cryptocurrency industry, where the myth of making wealth coexists overnight, there is a hidden path to success: follow one person in your early 20s. Around 2013, a group of the smartest and most adventurous young people poured into this barbaric world. Some of them have just dropped out of school, and some haven't graduated yet. Following the craziest entrepreneurs of that era, they work at the grassroots level in trading platforms, mining pools, and media companies.
They're betting on some kind of perception. This perception allowed them to recognize opportunities faster than their peers in every wave of technology ten years from now.
Buffett once said, “Life is like a snowball; the important thing is to find very wet snow and a long slope.”
The cryptocurrency industry in 2013 was that wet and long slope. And those who set foot on this slope in their early 20s have been rolling their snowballs for 12 years.
Xiao Hong is one of them. But he's not the only one.
Interns on an equity list
One day in 2013, in an office building in Zhongguancun, Beijing, two young people were discussing a crazy thing.
Wu Jihan, 27, has a double degree in psychology and economics from Peking University. She just left a venture capital firm and has been investing in Bitcoin and preaching for the past two years — the Chinese version of Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper he translated is still the most widely circulated version.
The person sitting across from him is Zhan Ketuan. He is 34 years old. He has a bachelor's degree from Shandong University and a master's degree from the Institute of Microelectronics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has more than 10 years of experience in integrated circuit development, and is recognized as a chip designer in the industry.
But there's a third protagonist in this story.
Ge Yuesheng, 21, just graduated from Huzhou University one year ago. Before joining Bitmain, he and Wu Jihan were colleagues at a private equity fund in Shanghai. At the time, he was working as interns, and both were doing investment analysis. Under Wu Jihan's influence, Ge Yuesheng began to come into contact with Bitcoin.
Of these three people, Ge Yuesheng is the least visible one. He has neither Wu Jihan's industry insight, nor the technical background of the Zhan Ke Group.
But he had one thing: money. To be precise, it's the family business's resources—capital, mines, electricity.
At the time, Wu Jihan and the Zhan Ke team didn't have much money. According to a later disclosure from a former Bitmain executive, Ge Yuesheng's family invested a lot of money in the early stages, and several members of the family became shareholders. Wu Jihan came out to establish Bitmain and was largely funded and helped by Ge Yuesheng. His intern can be considered Bitmain's earliest angel investor.
The division of labor between the three is clear: Wu Jihan is responsible for industry judgment and the market, Zhan Ke Group is responsible for chip research and development, and Ge Yuesheng provides funding and resources.
In order to invite the Jenk team out of the mountains, Wu Jihan proposed an amazing condition: Jenk Group doesn't get paid, but if they can develop an ASIC chip that can efficiently run the Bitcoin encryption algorithm in the shortest possible time, they will give him 60% of the shares.
It took only half a year for the Jenker team to develop the 55nm Bitcoin mining chip BM1380 and the first generation ant miner based on this chip.
In October 2013, Beijing Bitmain Technology Co., Ltd. was formally established. According to business data, in the earliest shareholder structure, Zhan Ke Tuan held 59.2% of the shares and Ge Yuesheng held 28% of the shares — and Wu Jihan's name wasn't even on the list of founding shareholders at the time.
This detail was later interpreted over and over again. Why did 21-year-old Ge Yuesheng get 28% of the shares?
Bitcoin in 2013 was far from mainstream. In April of that year, the price of Bitcoin broke through $100 for the first time; in November, it surged above $1,000; then, in December, the price fell back and began a two-year bear market.
Most people poured in when prices soared and fled when prices plummeted. There are many wealthy people in the family, but Ge Yuesheng chose to enter the market at the earliest and most chaotic time in the industry, and tied himself to that ship.
In addition to money, this requires some intuition about trends and the courage to bet in the face of uncertainty.
The later story is widely known: it took less than five years for these three people to make Bitmain the world's largest mining company. At its peak, they occupied more than 70% of the world's Bitcoin computing power, and at one point the valuation reached 15 billion US dollars. In the 2018 Hurun Blockchain Richest List, Wu Jihan became the “new richest person after 85” with a net worth of 16.5 billion yuan, and Ge Yuesheng became the “new richest person in the post-90s” with a net worth of 3.4 billion dollars.
He left Bitmain with Wu Jihan in 2019 and co-founded Matrixport. Ge Yuesheng became the CEO of Matrixport and continues to this day.
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 point.
The first batch of “OKCoin Whampoa Military Academy” cadets
If Ge Yuesheng's story is a classic example of an intern becoming a co-creator, then the next story shows another possibility: from being the No. 1 employee to being bought at a high price by the old owner's competitor.
One day in 2013, a young engineer named Wang Hui walked into an office in a Beijing office building.
The office is small and poorly furnished, and looks more like a temporary base for a startup. There is a whiteboard on the wall, filled with system architecture diagrams and flowcharts. The tables were put together, and less than ten people were seated.
This is OKCoin's whole family.
Founder Xu Mingxing is worried about recruiting people. At the time, Bitcoin was still a grey area in China, and mainstream media reports were either Ponzi schemes or “money laundering tools.” Engineers who are willing to give up the big manufacturer's offer and join a “coin trading company” are almost impossible to find.
Wang Hui was the first person willing to take risks.
As the number one employee at OKCoin, he needed to build the entire technical architecture from scratch. There are no ready-made solutions to copy, no mature open source projects to use, and even very few competitors to reference. Everything is blank.
This represents a huge challenge, but also a huge opportunity: if he can do this, he will become one of the most tech-savvy people in the industry.
After two years, Wang Hui almost single-handedly built OKCoin's core trading system. The performance of that matching engine could be said to be overwhelming in the industry at the time. “Many trading platforms' systems can't even handle basic concurrency,” he later recalled. “If a few more people trade at the same time, they get stuck.”
More importantly, he has trained his entire technical team from scratch. He brought in many of the core technicians of OKCoin (and OKX, OKX, which later changed its name).
But in 2016, Wang Hui chose to leave.
There are many rumors in the community about the reason for his departure: disagreement with the founder's ideas, 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 contacts he had built up at OKCoin.
The first stop after leaving was a brief collaboration with another former OKCoin executive. That person, Zhao Changpeng, later founded Binance and became the richest cryptocurrency in the world.
At the beginning of 2018, Wang Hui and two old colleagues founded JEX together to trade cryptocurrency options. This point in time is very delicate. In January 2018, the price of Bitcoin began to plummet from an all-time high of $20,000, and the entire industry was in mourning. Most people fled, but Wang Hui chose to buck the trend and enter.
JEX received investments from Huobi and Gold Finance. Just a year later, in 2019, Binance announced the wholly-owned acquisition of JEX, and the transaction amount is said to be hundreds of millions of yuan.
It was a dramatic end: OKCoin's first employee, the company he started was bought by Binance.
Going back and forth, they all came from the same place.
Therefore, there is a saying circulating in the coin community: OKCoin is the “Huangpu military academy for the cryptocurrency industry.”
Vectors, Windows, and Survivors
Now let's go back to Xiao Hong.
In 2013, he was just a sophomore doing an internship at 1-bit. This internship probably only took up a very small amount of space in his life history — after all, his main line was WeChat Ecological Entrepreneurship: Yibang, Weihan, Nightingale Technology, and eventually sold to Minglue Technology.
But some things leave a mark.
Xiao Hong introduced himself as “BTC Holder.” That means he has at least maintained his interest and involvement in cryptocurrency from 2013 to today. In a market where prices fluctuate 100 times, being able to hold on for 12 years is itself an ability, or a kind of belief.
More importantly, that brief internship in 2013 probably shaped his methodology: not pursuing technological disruption from zero to one, but rather being good at finding gaps in existing big platforms and using product capabilities to create value.
From OneBit to WeChat Ecosystem's OnePartner and WeChat Companion, to the AI browser plug-in Monica, and finally to the general-purpose AI Manus, the underlying logic of this path is probably the same: find a large platform that is exploding and make the best tool to use 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 2013-2017. It was a “chaotic period” for this industry. Early enough, until most people aren't aware of the opportunities; yet not too early, until infrastructure is completely unestablished. Those entering this window have gained a disproportionate amount of room to grow. By 2020 and beyond, the industry is relatively mature, and it will be much harder for newcomers to replicate the same path.
Second, choosing whom to talk to is more important than choosing what to do. Ge Yuesheng followed Wu Jihan, Wang Hui followed Xu Mingxing, and Xiao Hong followed Shenyu. These bosses aren't necessarily the most famous, but they were all the most judgmental and executive people at the time.
The benefits of following people are not just learning things, but more importantly, entering a high-quality network. Wang Hui was quickly invested and acquired by Binance after leaving OKCoin, in large part because of the reputation and connections he has built up in the community.
Third, the ability to bet in the face of uncertainty is scarce. Joining Bitcoin in 2013, sticking to a bearish DEX project in 2018, and giving up a stable job to start a business—these choices all seemed risky at the time.
But risk and benefit are symmetric. Those who are willing to take on uncertainty end up receiving rewards commensurate with the risks they have taken.
Of course, these are all stories of survivor bias.
Most of the young people who entered the coin industry around 2013 did not become billionaires. Many of them left the market in a bear market, went short in a bull market, and went back to zero in the midst of a sharp rise and fall. But that doesn't stop us from extracting something valuable from survivors' stories.
On the last day of 2025, Xiao Hong tweeted: “If you want to make good products in a global market, there are many problems that don't come from the business itself or the user value itself. It's all worth it.”
From a one-bit intern in 2013 to Meta vice president in 2025, Xiao Hong spent 12 years.
In these 12 years, his former boss, Kamiyu, went from being a 23-year-old graduate student entrepreneur to becoming the godfather of the industry with a net worth of 10 billion dollars. Wu Jihan, a former partner of Kamiyu, went from being a preacher to the founder of a mining empire, then left in infighting, started a new business, and rose again.
The pace of this industry is too fast. As fast as ten years is enough to complete a person's transformation from an intern to a billionaire, and as fast as ten years is enough for a giant to fall from its peak and rise again.
So be kind to every intern close to you. Because you never know who you'll need to invite to dinner in ten years.
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