f2pool Co-founder Chun Wang: Made First $100,000 in Bitcoin 13 Years Ago Through Cross-Border Arbitrage
Chun Wang, co-founder of f2pool, recalled his early Bitcoin experiences before and after joining f2pool. He mentioned that back then, he bought large amounts of Bitcoin from several overseas traders using LRUSD on high-speed trains and sold them to novice users on Taobao, cycling back to LRUSD. During favorable market conditions, he could earn over a thousand dollars in profit multiple times a day, accumulating $100,000 in savings within the first few months, which gave him the confidence to go "all in" on Bitcoin and crypto entrepreneurship. f2pool was subsequently founded in 2013, becoming one of the first Bitcoin mining pools in China and an important early player globally.
Public information shows that f2pool quickly grew after its establishment, capturing about one-third of the Bitcoin network's hash rate in a short time, becoming the largest mining pool globally at one point, and playing a core role in PoW mining across multiple chains, including Ethereum. Chun also mentioned another co-founder, "bitfish" (Discus Fish), as a "rare entrepreneurial partner even years later," but noted that he was so busy taking photos of trains and stations that he hardly documented their actual crypto business activities at the time.
Source: Public Information
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This recollection directly exposes the logic of wealth accumulation in the early crypto industry: it was not about "high-tech mining" from the start, but rather typical cross-border information and regulatory arbitrage—using LRUSD to buy coins in bulk overseas and then selling them at a markup to novice users domestically, who were at an information disadvantage. This is a business model that leverages differences in payment systems, currency exchange restrictions, and cognitive disparities, fundamentally similar to various historical cross-border trades in foreign exchange, gold, and commodities, with Bitcoin as the new vehicle.
In terms of industry structure, the path of "early arbitrage → primitive capital accumulation → pivot to infrastructure (mining pool)" is a typical template for the formation of power dynamics in the crypto world. f2pool started by connecting retail investors with overseas liquidity and eventually grew into one of the largest mining pools globally, illustrating that those who grasp capital and technology early can seize the high ground in network and infrastructure layers, transforming one-time arbitrage income into long-term protocol-level revenue.
From a financial history perspective, this aligns closely with the development patterns of many emerging markets: during phases where institutions are not yet perfected and regulation is not fully comprehensive, the earliest participants achieve excess returns through institutional gaps and cognitive differences, then reinvest these returns into higher-dimensional assets—here, that means hash power and PoW network control. Once the network matures, later participants find it difficult to replicate such "low-cost beginnings" and can only compete atop already established infrastructures.
On a deeper level, this personal story also reflects the "memory loss" characteristic of the crypto industry: Chun mentioned being too busy taking photos of trains and stations to document actual business activities, which is both a personal regret and a collective memory gap for the industry. Many key actions in the early days occurred in gray areas—cross-border capital flows, ambiguously regulated payment tools, and edge-case platform rules—these aspects are often not systematically recorded but largely determine who becomes the "entrepreneurial hero" in later narratives and who is merely forgotten as an arbitrageur.