The Pomp Podcast - #674 Building Multi-Billion Dollar Companies w/ Jihan Wu

Episode Date: September 29, 2021

Jihan Wu is the co-founder of Matrixport, a crypto asset management firm with more than $10 billion in AUM. He previously co-founded Bitmain, one of the largest mining companies in the industry. In this conversation, we discuss bitcoin, Bitcoin cash, blocksize wars, Matrixport, Bitmain, Bitdeer, his personal portfolio, and what Jihan is most excited about moving forward.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Jihan Wu is the co-founder of Matrixport, a crypto asset management firm with more than $10 billion in AUM. He previously co-founded Bitmain, one of the largest mining companies in the industry. In this conversation, we discuss Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, the block size wars, Matrixport, Bitmain, Bitdeer His personal portfolio And what Jihan is most excited about moving forward

I really enjoyed this conversation with him And I hope you do as well If you like this type of content I highly suggest that you tune in to our new show It's a live stream on YouTube every day From 11am to 1pm Eastern Called The Best Business Show Why is it the best? Because we said it was

We cover the daily topics that everyone wants to hear And we also bring on great guests So go head over to YouTube Search Anthony Pompliano subscribe to the channel, and tune in every day from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Eastern. Hope you guys enjoy it. Let's get into this episode. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I'm here with Jihan Wu. Thank you so much for doing this. Hi. Great to meet you, Bob.

Absolutely. Let's just get started. Obviously, a lot of people know who you are, but they may not know the backstory as to how you got into Bitcoin. So maybe walk us through kind of when you first discovered Bitcoin, what drew you to it, and then we can start there. Yeah, it was like 10 years ago, exactly 10 years ago, 2011, when I was reading some technical news report, and I found out Bitcoin news, and it got my attention immediately. me. Then I started to research and read into the English news reports. And then finally, I found out that BitcoinTalk.org, the forum, and lots of other white papers, things. Just in a few days, I just found out that this is the thing I'm going to do with my life. and it's really exciting. It was kind of a coincidence.

Maybe it's a very good arrangement by God or something. In the university, I studied finance, but I spent a lot of my time on the monetary history, which is not really kind of my class. I read lots of books about it. I feel very interested in about the gold and the paper money, the fat money, lots of history. I know a lot about it. When I found out about Bitcoin, I knew that, OK, this is just a kind of private money and it's private money based on the Internet.

So it will be things that we have never seen before because the internet plus private money, this could not happen before many decades ago. It's only can happen right now. At that time, if you want to sell an idea about, let's build kind of a private money based on the internet without the approval of government, the support of government, I think maybe like 10,000 people, you can get one supporter of such kind of ideas. But very lucky that we got to have the internet so that we can gather such kind of very scarce people on the internet to be a small community. And in 2011, when I went to the BitcoinTalk.org, I see like just tens of thousands of people. just like it's a very small crowd people but people managed to build a small community there they already have lots of economic activities people are renting service to each other's vps vpn um your torrent downloading service and you can also buy hardware smiling hardwares from each

other and second-hand hardware and of course the most famous uh deal was done by the pizza right That was the most expensive pizza in history because I spent tens of thousands of Bitcoin to buy a pizza. That was really fantastic. That was an early day. And the first day I found out about Bitcoin, I just gave up the other studies. I was trying to go to the CPA exam in the past, and I just gave up. I just spent all my extra time from work just focusing on this. And so at some point, you decide to start Bitmain and build what has become the largest or one of the largest hardware providers for miners.

Talk a little bit about where that idea came from and then those early days of actually starting that business. Yeah, I think it was, I think the most original ideas is from the BitcoinTalk.org, their forum. At that time, people are starting to sell shares, raising money. very early in 2012 or somewhere like that people are starting to do such kind of things uh back at that time there is a website called the global bitcoin stock exchange uh it was by a british guy and but he but he married a chinese teacher and he started teaching english in china and he built a um website that uh make people possible to uh easily shares with money to do something and most uh um that most of the companies so-called companies on that website is mining companies

uh it's about kind of a high school students are ranking up some gpu and mining bitcoin and starts to distribute such kind of money rewards to its shareholders and i still remember that one of the united states high school boys managed to sell such kind of shares and with lots of money and among bitcoin and then being called appreciates he got his university tuition just fully covered and that's really fantastic story and from there we got to support and invest the very early bitcoin company uh and the ticker was asic commander it's quite straightforward uh doing asic design and doing the bitcoin money as commander it was once take um like 70 or 80 of the hash rate on the network and the other company uh the investment was only around um

100 000 new dollars um but it got might be like a one thousand times of return and has time to to its investors, but I only got a lot of risk, large shares in that company. And I also forcing that is when a company got some problems in later stage, maybe it will got beaten down by Bitfury, another competitor, which was very famous as well. So I think I need to stop BMA.

That was 2013. And when you started Bitmain, walk me through in terms of how did you capitalize the business? And then you all grew really, really fast at one point there, especially going into 2016, 2017. So just kind of walk through how you built that business. Yeah, Bitmain's funding was mostly from, I think, a foundation from the investment reward I got from the X-Managers, which was quite a lot. And I also raised money from a group of other investors, which we call ourselves like a piece of source. It's a small group of people.

And I found other partners. I found another partner, co-founder of BingMei. And he has quite a few years basic design experience. And he bring the team and I bring the money, bring the idea together. and we started the company together uh firstly i just position myself as kind of a vc investors i believe because i was a kind of a financial background i for quite a long time and my teenager i think i want to do something like a good investment like warren buffet like soros um or some other very good vc investors like citroen are doing that support a very good

technology companies so our what why i was dreaming is that i just want to be invested but only after i invested the money into beaming i found out that i just cannot leave the company without managing it so it's kind of that investors became a co-ceo something like that so i I managed to, so the company just consumed my time, I guess, seven years or eight years. So you basically went from, you wanted to fund the business and be more of the investor. You said, you know, Warren Buffett, George Soros, but as the business grew, it kind of consumed more and more of your time. It obviously was becoming a bigger portion of your net worth.

And then you kind of became a co-CEO. When you look back at Bitmain today, what was like the biggest lessons learned that you had uh in building that business well i i think uh i'm kind of quite lucky i would have to say i think just quite a few entrepreneur they tried they uh uh tried very hard but it's just owning um a small number of them can achieve um this kind of uh very dominant um position in industry um i think i'm quite a quite lucky uh i think the most important uh i think there is another kind of a single biggest lessons that i learned from i think i learned lots of things uh before as i said before i started beaming i just kind of a financial background i want to

do investment but after beaming i think it's just kind of a very whole big lesson it's like a I just learned a lot from the semiconductor technology and the manufacturing, sales, marketing, and managing a small team and a very large team, and how to build it, and lots of those failures, difficulties. And I also managed to save a company that was almost bankrupt. And, of course, in essence, I learned to fight against my co-founders very arguably. And then later, we just reached kind of an agreement. Okay, let's set it.

And let's have peace. So I think it's a whole journey. It's a very great journey. And a lot of things from it. Yeah. It's very interesting because you funded it, right? It grew incredibly fast. There was a fight.

And then I think one of the things that people didn't expect or didn't understand was at some point, basically all of the co-founders came together and there was this kind of agreement. OK, look, no more fighting. Let's move forward under a plan around 2017, 2018 and kind of leading up to that time period was the block size wars. And I think this is one of those things where the further we get away from it, there's fewer and fewer people in the crypto industry. all these new people, they don't really understand what that was or kind of what the different perspectives were. Walk us through kind of your recollection of that time and then kind of the decisions that you all made in terms of, you know, what eventually became Bitcoin Cash and all that. Yeah, at that time, I think it was kind of driving by a kind of a passion. You know, um the bitcoin changed my whole life right from a kind of a poor students and uh later

uh become kind of so-called billionaire or something uh and um it's also kind of a boost of my confidence right i can do things i can make things happen uh so um i have to say because of the whole journey have kind of a very strong attachment towards bitcoin i i think i believe lots of the audience here even uh including you palm may have the same kind of um feelings that bitcoin is something that changes the life of you guys and you just feel quite passionate about it you want to do great things about it we all know that the scanning debate was very important at that time um and two different uh two different group of peoples have different ideas uh about what is the best uh for the bitcoin um i think bitcoin uh was able to uh enjoy quite a good life

uh a very good uh golden times happy times uh before the scaling was an issue uh because uh satoshi nakamoto uh coded uh one megabyte had a limit there but he left it a word that one day we should raise it but he left he never made it happen he never did that and um uh later uh people started to have a debate whether we should have hard fork whether we should have um a larger block size and if um uh the larger block size will lead to decentralization or not and uh whether we need to run uh the bitcoin node on a raspberry or not uh it's uh i think those uh a lot of debate is getting more and more bizarre and more and more unrealistic um and um first i started to take a stance that we should increase the block size and uh obviously such kind of

debate was what was not able to happen on lots of them a traditional and important discussion values like bitcoin uh talked all or our bitcoin uh it was kind of uh censored there some of us believe that this if the block size cannot or could not be increased it may mean the defeat or failure of bitcoin widely supported by lots of users so even though we may not get the support from the bitcoin core developers i think it's better to have a kind of a branch or a kind of of different branch, different ways. We need to reserve kind of a seed for the Bitcoin's original design. So when you think about Bitcoin and that scaling debate, right, obviously we get the fork, we get Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash. There's a whole bunch of questions that people want me to

ask. I'm not going to get to all of them, but maybe I'll ask you kind of two or three of the top ones that do our best to kind of cover what people want to know. So first is in terms of your personal portfolio do you still hold bitcoin and bitcoin cash do you hold other assets like how do you think of your personal portfolio uh and really kind of using that as a proxy for um you know kind of how you want exposure moving forward yeah i held lots of uh different kinds of coins uh in very early days i kind of was i think just in the born of a litecoin just a few days i started to my Litecoin, you know that? So I know, Palm, that you have only Bitcoin.

It's just I listen to other podcasts, but I'm kind of a very different person than you. I hold lots of coins. In my portfolio, I have like 20 to 30 kinds of coins, but the majority of them are kind of Ethereum, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and there is still some kind of Litecoin and XCC. e-cash. Basically, it was a kind of fork of Bitcoin. And there are lots of other coins, like lots of DeFi tokens and some other blockchains like SOL. Yeah, I hold lots of it.

And between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, do you think that you hold more Bitcoin or more Bitcoin Cash now? More Bitcoin Cash. More Bitcoin Cash. All right. And then when you think about kind of where we are today in hindsight, knowing everything you know now in terms of how the block size debate worked out, prices of assets, et cetera. What do you think like the biggest one or two lessons are that you learned, you know, through that time period up until today? You mentioned earlier that like there was this really interesting thing where you went from a student to a billionaire in like a short period of time. Like just what were some of those lessons? Yeah. First, I think I have started to go to some very, very deep understanding about the

network effect. I learned about network effect quite early, but it was paper knowledge. But when you got to such kind of experience, you know that the network effect is really strong. It's really something. And also, I know that it's really hard to reach kind of a good governance or kind of governance or consensus in a purely crowd or decentralized crowd. I think that it would be really hard. And people, it's very easy for people to have a kind of disagreement that cannot be consolidated or reach kind of agreement with each other. So I think if I know that for lots of people,

they have a different great different opinions uh with the bitcoin core developers but what they are really choosing to do is that let's just just go to ethereum let's start some other uh blockchain protocols and they are doing quite fine uh doing quite well yeah i i think uh maybe um in the future i think i should take this the same decisions as those people are doing yeah and And then in terms of what I'll call the like social aspect. So there's definitely a technical aspect to this whole thing, right? In terms of do we increase the block size? Do we not?

But then there was an entire like, I don't know, like social civil war within Bitcoin, right? It's probably the best way to describe it. And I feel like you and a couple of other folks, both on the Bitcoin cash side and on the Bitcoin side, really, really went at it and kind of were in this like deep debate and argument. Is that something that you think is healthy and like it had to happen in order for us to get the technical side worked out? Or do you feel like that was just something that like is a one-time event and we're unlikely to see something that kind of serious and aggressive in the future? Yeah, I think, honestly speaking, I think it was really bad. I think in kind of a confliction like this, the first thing to die is the truth, right? and the second thing uh to die is uh um this kind of uh rationale uh people starts getting

very emotional and um i think both sides have a line to each other i have to admit that i think it's better that the two community are separated and less kind of very meaningless and very destructive with each other. I think Bitcoin are doing quite good, are doing pretty well these days. It's a stock value got this position is very strong. And we see lots of institutions are coming to this. And no matter what other coins they are buying, but they are always buying Bitcoin. And I see Bitcoin Cash, even though it's in a lot of very strong position right now, because it did not get the name of Bitcoin, which was very important. And right now, the market cap is lagging behind. But we see that Bitcoin Cash people are perishing

this dream of peer-to-peer electronic cash and trying to develop various kinds of infrastructure that are waiting for people to use. And I see that those infrastructures are building from zero to one and to even more. And right now, there are kind of EVM-compatible sidechains on the Bitcoin Cash. So I think both communities are more focusing on the constructive work to do

and to promote and to grow its own community. um i believe that that's uh it's kind of a good situation but right now i still see that some of the community members are kind of hate with each other but i guess it's much much greater than before than many years ago for sure and so coming out of this uh scaling war uh a lot of people i don't think know but you went on to found a new company called matrix port uh and i think i've been blown away by how large this business has gotten, how quickly, but maybe walk us through what is Matrixport and kind of what was the idea for this new business? Yeah, Matrixport is kind of a crypto asset management company. It tries to provide sophisticated and full stack financial

products to its customers to help customers to navigate in this quite volatile, but highly fastly growing sector. And Mr. Ford started two years ago in the beginning of 2019, which was a very bearish time in the crypto industry. And we managed to grow the business to one of the most leading crypto financial service companies in Asia. Right now we manage more than 10 billion assets on our platform, and we help our customers to earn quite a lot of interest and revenues, and the monthly revenue is around, sorry, the monthly trading volume is between like 5 billion to 10 billion, depends on the timing, and right now we have 200 employees, We have offices in Singapore, Hong Kong.

So I think it's a pretty good growth. Yeah. The stats that I pulled off your website were 220 employees in 40 countries, $5 billion in monthly trading volume, up to $10 billion depending on the month, over $700 million in outstanding loans, and over $10 billion in assets under management and custody, which is insane given how quickly you've grown. What's driving most of that growth? Is it a focus on a specific geographic region? Is it certain products that you have? Is it just you and your co-founders and kind of the name and brand you bring? Like, why are so many people flocking to the product?

When we started the company, there are already lots of exchanges. But we found out that this is not a thing we are going to do like one year or two years. and I believe and I feel that lots of the crypto people already become kind of crypto natives. They are going to, it's their life, it's their belief, they are going to put their savings into crypto for their whole life. They are not going to sell. Maybe they will switch from one crypto to another,

but they are not going to sell. And in such kind of belief, we see that, We'll also see that the growth of this whole crypto space, it will grow to very large, more than 100 trillion or something like that. It will be much bigger than the stock market right now. So in such kind of a wide, big, and open financial network, there will need to be financial services. It's not only about exchange. It's not only about wallet.

People will need a kind of financial products to help them to navigate. for and we brought lots of innovative product firstly around the world for example the deal currency product which uh indeed is quite common in the um private bank industries but in crypto matrixport was the first company to brought the new currency product into this thing and we also invented products like Smart Trend. Basically, we help our customers to buy the option with the interest of the principal. So even if they have a wrong judgment about the direction of the price of the next period, they are not going to the principal. But if they are right they will get a kind of um uh apy up to like a 40 or 60 or something that is very high so it's

kind of very safe gamble or safe investment uh based on the price judgment we have lots of structural products like that so we have kind of branding that we brought the best products to our customers and uh now even uh if other companies are learning from us but people uh in this circle in the custom basis people know that it was uh uh initiated by major reports so we gain lots of trust and mr porter also uh we need to um know that the message portal was kind of some of uh from b main either beaming we spent lots of money and trying to do um the future technology about blockchain but in the end of 2018 bin main was in kind of a serious financial stress we need to spin off such kind of non-profitable uh teams into a separate company so we got a kind of

inherent from bin main that in the very beginning in the first day of bridge support we got like more than 100 employees that's really a big startup but so we've got lots of knowledge and lots of teams that are working with each other. We have such kind of experiences. So we managed to do things quite well. So a couple of things there. One is when you started matrix port, you had a hundred employees almost on day one. I'm assuming that a lot of them had already worked for you previously and

kind of followed you when you started this. And then two is not only are you providing what I would consider kind of standard products in this industry, but you also are trying to create and pioneer new types of products. You described one where you can basically hold an asset, earn interest, use that interest then to buy an option that can protect you, or you can double, you know, double down on your bet, which is kind of a very nuanced thing that really only crypto assets themselves can provide. When you think about the business and the products that you're building, do you have a framework that you use to evaluate building centralized infrastructure and products versus decentralized

infrastructure and products? Like, how do you think through where to focus? Yeah, I think it's kind of a decision that we have to make. If you ask me, I think both of the CeFi and the DeFi got lots of benefits in it. You know, I invest in lots of coins. If you ask me, what kind of choice do I make? I think I want to choose both. And for my personal investment, I do both.

I use DeFi quite a lot myself. But as a startup, we need to choose in the day one. And once we make that decision, we have, I don't think we have the luxury to just swing back and forth. no i think in the beginning we decided to c5 and we see that such kind of especially in the early days of 2019 such kind of very uh complicated um uh sophisticated financial products it's much much easier to be developed on a c5 uh platform um but the later uh um i think it's still a very

important uh driver uh of the growth of matrixport is that we are we were the first c5 platform that helped our customers to do the d5 mining and to earn the d5 uh revenues uh on a c5 platform people just uh just one click in the apps they will be able to participate those defies like like in Uniswap, or in Curve, or in Compound, in other kind of protocols, we are the first company to bring that as well. So we call it kind of a C-DeFi, yeah? So I believe that both of the ways will grow quite well,

but at the Metreport as a company, we choose the way, We choose the centralized finance, so we don't have a choice. We just grow on this road. Yeah. And talk to me a little bit about regulation and kind of the geopolitical element of all this. Obviously, a lot of people just saw kind of the China re-emphasis of some of the existing rules. They're cracked down.

I know that you all have offices in Hong Kong, Singapore. You have customers around the world. I think you have employees in 40 different countries. So I'm assuming that you spent a lot of time just thinking about kind of how all this is playing out. What's your view on the various regulatory regimes and kind of where the rules seem to be, you know, welcoming and embracing this stuff versus where maybe it's the exact opposite? The regulation, I think, is kind of a problem that we were not able to avoid in the crypto industry. And right now, both China and the United States, the very powerful governments, are trying to look into this problem.

And the China government already take a very clear stance that they don't like crypto, they don't like this decentralized blockchain. But I think that's quite understandable because China is quite a very large country with 1.4 billion of population. and the situation there was really complicated and the China government spends like 10 years to net this crypto to grow quite freely.

But I think right now the central government has already made a decision that this is not good. This is overall, it's bad for China. So they decide to keep the crypto sector out of the china's mainland and i don't think this is only kind of a re-existence of the past point of view from the chinese government because at this time we see more departments of the government are coming to this regulation and we also the warnings there are quite different it's it's just stating that this is the strategic decision

and planning from the party central. Such kind of wordings are not used randomly. It means that the government have already made a decision. I think in quite a few, you know, very short time, the China retail investors will disappear from, We're just they will all retreat from the crypto and owning those high net worth Chinese families will stay in the crypto. Yeah, it's fascinating to me how the geopolitics of this play out and kind of regulation ends up serving as both a carrot and a stick. Right. And I think that we're kind of seeing that really, really happen right now.

When you think about kind of where we're going and moving forward, what are you most excited about in the Bitcoin or crypto industry in terms of either products or companies or opportunities? Yeah, overall, crypto is quite exciting. We see that the protocol and the ecosystem are more and more change the world. It's already a sector of about $2 trillion US dollar market cap. And we managed to see those DeFi protocols on Ethereum. They have built some stable token exchanges that is the best, best thing in the world. Like Curve, the spread and then the liquidity is much, much better than any other centralized service in the world if you swap between the stable tokens and this is owning um

being achievable by the d5 protocol and we also think um in the game fight areas we see that those very early startups of gamify are getting the revenue more than a very large established a game company like tencent uh so uh generally i believe uh many many years ago the uh economic uh magazines say that the uh blockchain is a machine to build trust it's realizing this the whole industry is real like this uh with such kind of trust building machines people are getting together to build the gamify ips and the d5 which was only manageable only was possible by a very large financial companies uh right now uh i think we are in in the beginning of the next phase of blockchain growth uh maybe there is kind of uh downturn uh in short term like six or nine months

or 12 months maybe uh but uh after this short period of uh downturn we will see uh next phase of growth uh we will uh right now um we are seeing this starting point of the blockchain started to have an impact over the real world but if we have another one year two year we will see that a more real world impact from the blockchain to the real world uh what we are talking about nowadays um it's about tokenization everything um and we can have the real estate our costs um and the land um the stock of the company and the debt or other financial instrument uh before on the blockchain and we maybe soon we will see that the companies other inventions be funded by the blockchain uh financial market and we will see some other uh collaborations um happening uh that will be

able to break the monopoly by lots of uh big techs uh for example uh the gamify is definitely a proof that a small um just average joe combined together um with the help of uh trust building machines blockchain, they will be able to beat those very big game companies. I think such kind of exciting things will happen one after another, but such kind of exciting things will be by the help of lots of small building blocks in this industry, like we will need need decentralized identity protocols, and we will need some infrastructure companies that help to tokenization the real-world assets.

We will also need some kind of help from the regulators so that we will be able to see kind of IPO or some other kind of finance activities from real-world companies happening on the blockchain. Um, and, um, or maybe just, we reshape the organization way of the company into a DAO or something that we will need some kind of the work from the regulators. It's also a building block, um, in the future of the blockchain economy. Yeah.

Before we finish up, I've got three questions for you and I'll kind of just throw them out there. You tell me whatever you think or what comes to mind first. The first is, uh, if we look forward five years, what's your goal over the next five years? Or how do you want people to kind of evaluate on whether you are successful or not with what you're trying to accomplish in the next five years? Right now, I spend

most of my time on MedSupport. I hope that in five years, MedSupport will have a much more impact and build better product and to serve more populations in this world. So

five years later, MedSupport's success will kind of define my success. And another company I'm chairing right now is BDR. I hope that BDR can just expand its hardware and software technology and to build better products to this world that are only within Bitcoin mining or crypto mining. It can be a technology development platform to build better technologies to the world i also want to see that the blockchain technology can fulfill my expectation that we can have some kind of impact

towards the real world um right now the blockchain i think it's uh it's quite successful because it's building kind of uh it's technically it's literally i think it's kind of meta universe The Bitcoin, Ethereum, and lots of them don't have a real-world connection. They managed to build a protocol. They don't need a real bank, a real-world support, but it can sustain itself. But the next step for blockchain, I believe that it will or it will require to have much more exchange with the real world. Got it. And then my second question is going to be around Bitdeer.

Right now, you have kind of like a digital mining offering or virtual mining offering, and then there's hardware as well. What's kind of the goal there with that business? In the beginning, BDR was also a part of BMA. We expanded to Norway, to Europe, and to the United States. But later, since I decided to separate it away from Macri, So I just decided, okay, let's separate all the overseas assets towards independent company. And that is BDL right now. And right now, our dream is quite small.

We're just trying to be the best mining service company. We have a lot of tailored products, depending on the requirements from our customers. If they want a mining farm only, we just build a mining farm for them. if they want cloud mining we have a just one click solution so they can start to mine on the cloud um and we maintain the uh many machines we repair it or we do them uh we also uh build or they also help customers to source uh the many machines uh um but uh i hope that the video is to have a kind of mindset startup that I wish the team can be quite ambitious

to grow into our other areas and to grow the business much larger. Right now we have around 1,000 megawatt in the United States and 400 megawatt in North Europe. And this numbers is going to double, triple in the next few years and

we will see what we can do next. In BD, we have kind of an innovation fund that we encourage our employees, our colleagues to have more ideas of their own and not necessarily related

with Bitcoin or Bitcoin mining. If it's technology, if it's about improving the life of human beings, we will evaluate and invest such kind of ideas. And then my last question for you is, through the end of this year, we've got another three, three and a half months left.

What do you think about asset prices? Do you have an idea as to where Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, any of the other assets are going from a price perspective? Yeah. Since the Chinese retail investors are quite soon going to retreat from this market, I think it's a little bit bearish in the short term. But I still have a strong sense, I feel strongly that after this kind of a small short period

of bearish time, we will see a kind of very fast growth of a blockchain asset. We see that the money printing is not stopping all over the world and everything is in kind a high inflation and people need to stop value and people will also want to um have a kind of money that can do their trade on the internet freely without a restriction without friction and people will also are building lots of stacks in the smart contract um in the end of this year Maybe it's just kind of sideways right now, but it's quite, I'm quite optimistic about the next year. Got it. So you think sideways through the end of the year, but next year we get a pretty big move up, both Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash, et cetera. All right. Last, last, last question

for real. When you think back to your career in this space, you went from student to billionaire, which I think is one of the most incredible stories throughout the creation of an industry like this. We've seen this happen before in the 80s, 90s, in the 2000s, and now in this kind of crypto boom of 2009 all the way till today. For the young people that are watching, what's your best piece of advice for them from a career standpoint in terms of many of them aspire to build a life of wealth and kind of success. Is there any lesson that you've got from your kind of run here

that you would impart on them in terms of how they could pursue the same thing? Yeah, very great. Very great question. Just focus on what you are really good at and don't let other people's opinion about what you should do in the future to impact you. Just focus what you are really good at and what you are really excited about it.

That's a great piece of advice. All right, Jihan, listen, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I know you're a busy man. You got all kinds of stuff going on. I think people will really appreciate kind of just your transparency and honesty and kind of the thoughts you have about everything in the past and everything you're doing now. Where can we send people if they want to learn more about Matrixport, Bitdeer, or find you on the internet?

Is there one place where they can kind of send you messages or they can get in contact with you? Yeah, they can follow my Twitter. All right. So follow you on Twitter is probably the best place. Awesome. We've got it. Just pulled it up here. All right. Listen, thank you so much for doing this. We will we'll definitely have to do it again in the future. And best of luck. And we'll we'll talk in a little bit and we'll see see the progress you guys make. Yeah. Very great. Thank you. Thank you, Paul.