Less than a year after joining the exchange, the Bitcoin building collapsed

In October 2018, I accidentally received a WeChat message from Teacher An. She told me that the company we worked for together was acquired, and after she received compensation and left, she happened to be in a career gap period, and wanted to talk to me about her future career direction.

We worked together in a digital currency company. In September 2017, the central bank, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission and other state ministries and commissions suddenly decided to ban all digital currency transactions in China and shut down all domestic exchanges, causing chaos in the market. Many people chose to resign in a hurry at that time, but Mr. An stayed and was responsible for the liquidation of the exchange until the company was finally acquired.

The meal that day was a bit dull, and Teacher An and I chatted casually. After the company was acquired, most people chose to take the severance pay and leave. I casually asked a few familiar former colleagues about the news, and the answers I got were similar - although none of them stayed in the acquired company, they were still in the digital currency circle after a while.

"It's not easy for people in this circle to leave, although the current situation is indeed not very good." She said, "But in fact, the current market is still quite wild, and there are many opportunities."

1

In the fall of 2016, after working in the gaming industry for more than a year without any success, I decided to change my career. After confirming that I didn't have any other skills, I decided to try my old profession - data analyst.

A few days after I posted my resume online, I received a call. The other party said straight to the point that they were a Bitcoin company that was in urgent need of a data analyst and asked me to go for an interview the next day.

At that time, it had been seven years since Bitcoin was invented, but in China, it was far from being well-known. I knew very little about it myself. I only knew that it was a virtual currency that claimed to "become the world's universal currency in the future."

But I have a good impression of it, maybe because of its "technological sense", or maybe because a writer I once liked "took the first step" in the Bitcoin industry and achieved financial freedom.

All in all, I did believe at that time that Bitcoin would become the world's universal currency at some point in the future.

The next day when I arrived at the company, it was Teacher An who was in charge of the interview.

She told me that the company is now preparing to launch a new Bitcoin exchange interface. In order to "let data drive operational decisions", data analysis must be carried out in every link, from customer acquisition to traffic, verification, and conversion, to ensure that as many customers as possible can successfully complete the registration process and enter the exchange - this is also my initial job task.

Analyzing traffic data is much easier than I thought. You just need to embed detection code at each process point and then check the data detected at each link every day. If the data of any link is abnormally low, use auxiliary tools such as mouse heat map to check the web design. If you can find any unreasonable places, just submit them directly to the UI designer.

“Does attracting users need to focus so much on user experience?” I asked Mr. An. “If the coin keeps rising in value, users will come to trade anyway.”

“In the early years, we didn’t need to be so careful,” Mr. An shook his head. “Our exchange started early, so it didn’t matter if the user experience was a little worse at that time—users even helped us make instructional videos on the registration process. But now there are more peers and users have more choices, which can be regarded as forcing us to make improvements.”

“Do we have many users?”

"In terms of quantity, it's not a lot, but it's not a small percentage. The number of new customers has increased a lot recently, which is why we are working hard to promote the new exchange interface." Teacher An looked at me deeply, "As for the effectiveness of the new exchange, it all depends on your data to judge."

"That's all?"

"Just finish this first and then talk about other things," Teacher An smiled, "Also, I'll give you a small souvenir for joining the company."

What Teacher An handed me was a small orange plastic round plate, which was two or three times larger than a one-yuan coin. At first glance, it looked a bit like a casino chip. The company's logo and the words "1K Bits" were printed on the front, and there was a long laser sticker on the back.

"For the 'mint' (physical Bitcoin) minted by the company, just peel off the sticker on the back and enter the code below into the online wallet. Yours is 1000 bits (0.001 Bitcoin), not much."

I thanked Mr. An and carefully put it away. In the following months, I received several mints of different denominations, most of which I sold at the exchange. Only the one I received when I joined the company has never been opened.

On my first day at work, after Teacher An had finished giving me the tasks, it was already past 11 noon. I returned to the office from the conference room. The whole room was noisy, and several young girls were chattering about sharing a large pile of KFC.

"Are you the new colleague who joined today? This is for you." A girl ran up to me and handed me a bag of fried chicken wings.

I took it somewhat flattered. She probably saw my confusion and added, "Eat it. It's okay. It was given to me by a customer."

It turns out that since the end of 2013, the central bank has issued a document prohibiting third-party payment institutions from connecting to Bitcoin. In order to solve the problem of customers recharging to buy coins, the exchange opened several corporate accounts in the name of other shell companies as fund connections - that is, customers first transferred the funds for cryptocurrency trading to the connection account, and then the colleagues in the customer service department deposited them into the corresponding account of the exchange one by one according to the records.

Although this indirect recharge method nominally avoids regulation, it also makes the user's account arrival time very slow.

Mr. An said that it takes an average of two days for a customer to deposit money into their account. If there is a problem with the security verification process, it may even take six or seven days. When the price of the currency rises rapidly, some customers cannot wait for a few days. Today, a customer came all the way from Suzhou and bought KFC for the colleagues in the customer service department, just to get the RMB he just deposited into his account at the exchange immediately.

I looked up outside the door and found that there was indeed a man wandering in the corridor, looking into our office from time to time. Although Suzhou is not far from Shanghai, it is indeed a bit rare to make a special trip for this. Soon, the colleague from the customer service department completed the process, and he turned around and left in a hurry.

"It should be a big investor." Seeing my inquiring expression, Teacher An said, "A small investor wouldn't go to such great lengths just for two days."

Mr. An said that the Bitcoin market is a small market, and as long as you hold a few hundred coins, you can be considered a big player. For example, our entire exchange only changes hands about a thousand coins a day. It is precisely because of this that big players can easily influence the market trend. These big players are old hands who have been in the currency circle for many years, well-informed, and spend a lot of money. Not only do exchanges treat them as guests of honor, but small retail investors often follow their operations when buying and selling.

“You will understand after playing it more that the Bitcoin market is now a game for a few people. Only by following them can you get a share of the spoils,” she concluded.

2

As a new employee, I worked overtime for a few days and completed the task that was originally planned to take a week and a half in just three days. Teacher An was very satisfied, but he did not assign more tasks to me. He just asked me to "familiarize myself with the business structure and make some preparations for future work."

About half a month later, I finally understood the company's business structure: the business is mainly divided into two parts, namely "mining pool" and "exchange". The mining pool is an alliance of mining farms - because the global mining computing power is constantly increasing, it is difficult for a single mining farm to mine coins with only a little computing power in its hands. Therefore, small mining farms often unite and attach themselves to the mining pool operated by the enterprise in order to enjoy a fixed transaction share. For example, the various small mining farms in our company's mining pool were negotiated one by one from Sichuan to Inner Mongolia by colleagues from the Ministry of Commerce.

The Bitcoin exchange is the company's core business, consisting of two markets: "futures" and "spot". Each market has two trading entrances, RMB and USD, for domestic and overseas users respectively. As the price of Bitcoin fluctuates greatly and is traded 24/7, most users will choose the spot market with less risk in order to make a relatively "stable money".

The futures market is a completely different story. In addition to the fluctuation of the currency price, customers are allowed to use up to 20 times leverage, which makes the entire Bitcoin futures market look like a complete gamble. "If you can't bear the risk, it's best not to bet on futures." When introducing the business to me on the first day, Mr. An said so.

"Is it because—it's easy to lose money?" I asked.

"Generally speaking, it depends on how high your leverage is. The higher the leverage, the easier it is to blow up. Xiaojie from the technical department once made more than 100,000 yuan, but he was careless and didn't watch the market for half an hour. When there was a sharp drop, he didn't add to his position and his position went bankrupt." Teacher An shrugged, "Anyway, I don't trade futures very often, so I suggest you don't do this for the time being."

At the end of 2016, the entire Chinese cryptocurrency market was experiencing a frenzy. The soaring cryptocurrency market was like a whirlpool, attracting new customers who were still ignorant. The data background of the operations department recorded five to six hundred new users every day. Teacher An later told me that she had been here for more than two years, and this was the first time she saw such a crazy growth in user data.

Our users are divided into several categories. In addition to large investors and small retail investors who trade one or two coins as a hobby, the most frequent visitors to our exchange are actually "automatic cryptocurrency trading robots." Among them, the most prominent ones are robots that do "high-frequency trading."

Before 2017, Chinese Bitcoin exchanges did not charge transaction fees, which greatly facilitated high-frequency robots. In our exchange, there are also several high-frequency robots that execute trading programs day and night. At most times, it is common for a robot to execute 30,000 to 50,000 transactions a day.

In addition, "arbitrage" is another popular way for robots to play. At that time, there were six or seven Bitcoin exchanges like ours in the country, but the price of coins in different exchanges was different. "Arbitrage" players would open accounts in each exchange. When the price of one of the exchanges rose due to a large amount of purchases, their robots would immediately sell some Bitcoins in this exchange, and then buy the same amount of Bitcoins from other exchanges while the price difference was short-lived; and when the price fell, they would take the opposite approach of buying first and selling later. In this way, no matter whether the price rose or fell, they could ensure that the Bitcoin in their hands remained unchanged, and they could also make extra money through this arbitrage method.

Compared with high-frequency robots that purely test trading algorithms, "arbitrage" is more likely to yield a stable income. As long as the currency price is not sideways (referring to the small fluctuations in the Bitcoin price over a period of time, with no obvious upward or downward trend), there will always be profit.

The last type of users we call "Third Sisters". They are the most special group of customers. They buy a large amount of Bitcoin every month, but never care about the rise and fall. They only care about whether the Bitcoin they just bought can be transferred to other accounts immediately. Later, when I was guiding new employees to familiarize themselves with the business, the customer service manager Lao Jia told me that the "Third Sisters" were not actually speculating in Bitcoin. They were all participants in a financial scam called "MMM Financial Mutual Aid Platform" (hereinafter referred to as "3M").

According to 3M's rules, players who join the game must first "provide help" to others. That is, they must transfer a sum of money to a designated account within a specified time. Then in the next month, they can receive "help" from others, the amount of which is 130% of the previous "help provided", and this cycle will continue until the entire system cannot attract enough new players to join and the entire game collapses.

This is essentially a classic Ponzi scheme. The trader wanted to evade the supervision of fund flows, so he chose to use Bitcoin as a means of "help". A large number of "third sisters" who entered the game also became our clients.

"How do you know if the client is 'Sanmei'?" I asked Lao Jia one day later.

"They have a special way of speaking, and you can tell right away when you hear them," said Jia. "They started asking after the National Day in 2015. They would start by asking, 'Teacher, when can the bitcoins we bought be transferred to xxx's wallet address?' We were quite surprised at the time because we had never seen such polite customers. Later, when we got to know them, we asked them and found out that they were doing this."

"If it's Pang Piao, why don't we stop them outside?" I asked.

“We did think about whether to ban them from entering the market, but we finally decided not to. After all, there are several exchanges in China, and if we don’t allow them in, others will. Moreover, if we allow them in, the data of our exchange will look better.”

I nodded, but then I remembered the scene in the news where victims of financial scams held up banners to protest their rights. “When they find out they’ve been scammed, will they call and scold us?”

"Never." Lao Jia thought for a moment and said, "In fact, from 2015 to now, I know that several 3M companies have collapsed, but there are still calls from new 'third sisters'. At the beginning, the customer service would kindly remind us to pay attention to financial risks, but later they stopped. There are too many people, it's boring."

3

After working for a while, I found that this job is actually quite easy, as long as I can submit a decent data report every week. So most of the time I chat with my colleagues, and the topic is basically how to trade cryptocurrencies.

The company does not prohibit employees from trading cryptocurrencies at work, so it is common for everyone to turn on their computers to check the price trend of cryptocurrencies while working. Even if the leaders see it, they generally do not interfere. Colleagues in the technical department are very familiar with the trading engine. As soon as they get to work, they start several robots they wrote themselves at once, high-frequency ones, "brick-moving" ones, and have a lot of fun. However, most people in our operations department are not very good at programming, so they have to be small retail investors, manually watching the market every one or two hours, and estimating the price to make a few buy and sell orders.

"Our manual trading is much less efficient than that of the technical department." I couldn't help but say as I watched Teacher An manually placing orders on the exchange.

"If you really want efficiency, you can only rely on the futures market. Why don't you go to Adi for advice?"

Adi is the only person in our department who plays futures. His trading style is very unique. He only invests a few thousand yuan a day. Once the profit or loss reaches 300 yuan, he will immediately withdraw. But what is noteworthy about Adi is that he rarely loses 300 yuan. More often, he will make 300 yuan in less than half a day, then clear his position and leave, and start working with peace of mind.

Later I learned that Adi didn’t have any skills in futures trading. His only strategy was to “follow”: because he was in charge of contacting major clients, he knew the account numbers of many major clients of our exchange. Every day when he got to work, Adi would habitually check the trading status of several major clients. If the major clients went long, he would follow suit and vice versa.

Compared to Adi who relies on big investors as a barometer, Mr. An behaves more like a theorist, relying entirely on himself to watch the market, K-line and trend. One day during lunch break, I asked Mr. An if it was too late to enter the market now.

"It's still in time, you can still buy." Teacher An answered without hesitation, "The current momentum is probably still in the third wave (in the stock market wave theory, the third wave is often the longest and strongest wave), so buy as long as you have spare money."

Seeing the price of the coins my colleagues bought rising every day, I couldn't help myself. After weighing the pros and cons, I took out more than 500 yuan from my card and prepared to "fight" myself. But what should I buy? At that time, the price of Bitcoin had risen from more than 3,000 yuan per coin when I joined the company to just over 6,000 yuan. After much deliberation, I found another exchange and exchanged all the more than 500 yuan for Ethereum (the second largest cryptocurrency in terms of market value, second only to Bitcoin) at a price of 76 yuan per coin.

It's strange to say, after investing more than 500 yuan, I suddenly became a different person. I couldn't help but check the current price every 5 minutes. Although the amount didn't change much, every red and green change on the price board made me terrified. Two days later, I finally couldn't stand this feeling of being on edge every day, and when Ethereum rose to 85 yuan, I sold all of it, and finally breathed a sigh of relief.

Unexpectedly, less than two weeks later, when I opened the exchange again, I found that Ethereum had risen above 110 yuan.

Later I told this to Teacher An. Surprisingly, Teacher An did not comfort me as I expected. He just said calmly: "Just put the money in your pocket and be safe. I don't know how high these things will rise."

"But didn't you say before that you were still in the third wave?"

"That's letting it go up on its own. But if it goes up too fast and becomes a financial risk, that's different. There was such an incident a few years ago, and you know what the result was."

The “previous few years” mentioned by Mr. An refers to the end of 2013. That was the first climax of the Chinese Bitcoin market.

That winter, the booming Chinese players pushed the price of Bitcoin to a peak of $1,200. But it soon attracted the attention of the government, and the central bank led five national ministries to issue a notice stating that "Bitcoin does not have the same legal status as currency and cannot and should not be circulated and used as currency in the market." After the notice was issued, Bitcoin's price even fell by more than 60%.

At this time, the price of the coin has exceeded 8,000 yuan. We all know that this situation will not continue forever, but no one can predict when the price of the coin will start to fall and how hard it will fall. We joked that everyone is now like the insomniac in the joke, waiting for the upstairs neighbor to drop the second shoe heavily.

4

Soon, the New Year arrived as promised. What none of us expected was that the second shoe would come with the bell of 2017.

On January 6, 2017, the company organized a movie-watching trip. Before the movie was over, my phone started vibrating. I quietly opened it and took a look. Several Bitcoin groups were repeatedly posting the same news: "In order to regulate the financial order and warn of possible legal and policy risks, the central bank and other departments interviewed the heads of major exchanges in Beijing and Shanghai." Among the platforms subsequently named in the news, our company was listed.

When we returned to the company, the largest conference room was already deserted. Only the red coin price on the company's large screen (the coin price display method of digital currency exchanges is generally the same as that of US stocks, that is, green for rising and red for falling) continued to decline. However, after just one movie and three hours, the price had fallen from 8,600 to 6,800.

I looked around the office and saw colleagues gathered in groups of three or four, probably discussing this sudden meeting. But not many people were sitting in front of their computers or holding their phones to urgently sell their coins - probably because the last round of surge two or three days ago made most people cautious and did not leave most of their assets in the coin market and perish together.

At night, after the sudden shock, the voices in the cryptocurrency trading group gradually became mixed: some customers with heavy positions cried and said that most of the money they used to trade in cryptocurrency was borrowed, and "I almost lost all my pants"; some consoled themselves by saying "I heard that someone at OKCoin (China's largest digital currency exchange) lost 3,000 positions at once, so what I have is nothing"; some veterans who have been trading in cryptocurrency for many years said "the price fell even more sharply in 2013, but it also went up, didn't it", and tried their best to cheer up their friends in the group; and some customers who suffered particularly heavy losses believed that this big drop was "caused by the black exchange" and came angrily to "ask for an explanation"...

As for myself, I felt half relieved and half worried: I was relieved because I never traded cryptocurrencies again after the Ethereum incident; but I was worried because I couldn’t predict what impact this incident would have on my work.

Our company's troubles began almost immediately.

A colleague from the customer service department said that a customer called us the next day, crying and cursing. He first said that he had lost more than 1 million yuan in cryptocurrency trading, which was intended for buying a house. Then he accused us of being a black-hearted exchange that manipulated the price of the cryptocurrency. He also said that he would expose us on TV and make us pay for it. We were also very nervous at that time, but the head of the department was very calm, saying, "We didn't trade in the first place, so it would be useless even if we sued to the sky."

"You don't need to worry about what is said online, just explain it to the regulatory authorities."

Despite this, we were still busy with this matter for a while. We specifically retrieved all the transaction records of that customer from the backend. The company also issued a special report based on this record, which particularly emphasized that the exchange had never engaged in any manipulation, and that the user's losses were purely the result of blindly increasing leverage without paying attention to the exchange's risk warnings. A few weeks after the report was submitted, we did not wait for the regulatory authorities to further inquire about the report, and we slowly put our minds at ease.

After the crash, the exchange immediately shut down the futures market and US dollar transactions. In order to make up for the loss of revenue due to the closure of the futures market, the company decided to charge a 2‰ handling fee for each two-way transaction in the spot market. In addition, for newly registered users, a longer and more stringent identity review will be implemented.

During that period, although our work was going on as usual, the trading volume of the entire exchange was shrinking day by day. The first to flee were the "high-frequency" and "brick-moving" users. The currency trading robots declined rapidly. The accounts that could run more than 50,000 transactions a day could only do 2,000-3,000 orders a day. Most small retail investors suffered heavy losses in the previous plunge and had to choose to leave the market sadly. Even new customers who were fearless were mostly exhausted by the 7-day identity verification process. After all, it turned out that only the "third sisters" who didn't care about the rise and fall or the handling fees still insisted on staying in the exchange.

After the trading volume plummeted, our work became much easier. Although the price of the currency was better than we imagined, it barely stabilized at a price of just over 7,000 after a series of ups and downs, but it was followed by a long and hopeless sideways trend. Although at the annual meeting, the boss still encouraged us as always that "there will be more opportunities next year" and issued an unprecedentedly generous "Sunshine Award" - each of us received a full 0.1 Bitcoin, but most people privately believed that another cold winter in the currency market should have arrived.

However, it turns out that the calm at the beginning of 2017 made each of us make a wrong judgment. The sharp drop in the price of the currency and the stricter control of the central bank made us all think that this was a repeat of history three years ago and the beginning of another long low tide. But what we actually faced at that time was actually the calm before the last crazy storm in the Chinese digital currency market.

5

The Lunar New Year had passed in the blink of an eye, and the price of Bitcoin had not improved at all. In late February 2017, the company's HR manager suddenly came to me and said straight to the point: "Due to the company's business adjustments, I'm sorry that the Operations Department needs to cut the data analyst position."

Although the resignation notice was a bit sudden, I was not too surprised because the company had already started laying off employees since the end of December last year. From R&D to operations, colleagues passed by me one after another with resignation handover forms.

“Maybe this industry is really no longer viable.” I thought so as I completed my resignation procedures and left the company building.

But unexpectedly, soon, Ethereum and Litecoin, both mainstream digital currencies, began to see a surge in popularity. Along with them, countless other digital currencies, so-called “copycat coins”, came into people’s view. Many of them started to surge as soon as they were issued, and some even increased by nearly 20 times in just a few days.

During that time, if you clicked on an exchange that supported “altcoins”, the homepage was all green, dazzling. One exchange even had the ingenuity to open a chat window on the trading page for “coin holders” to chat anonymously. Countless slogans rolled in, making people feel uneasy: “Don’t look at it, it’s just a lottery!” “One coin for one young model, work again if you lose!”

Later, I quietly asked Yang Zhe, who used to be the person with the longest experience in cryptocurrency trading in the technical department, and he told me that a considerable number of altcoins are scams.

Yang Zhe said that among the batch of altcoins that have exploded, many have problems. The open source code of some coins is simply copied from the open source code of mature digital currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum; some coins have malicious bugs in their codes, which are likely to get stuck during the "mining" process; and some coins do not even have complete open source codes, and do not have ICO white papers (the first issuance of tokens by blockchain projects, a document describing the technical content of the project), but they have started "initial crowdfunding" on their official websites. As for exchanges, they naturally will not endorse the credit of altcoins. They only provide trading platforms, and profits and losses are the users' own business.

During that period, hot money quickly withdrew from the Bitcoin fund pool and poured into the trading of altcoins. However, the leading exchanges represented by the company have always been more cautious and unwilling to take risks in listing new altcoins. Therefore, during that period, the entire business transaction volume was relatively sluggish.

Unable to resist the envy of the rise of various digital currencies, I decided to enter the market again and make a quick buck while the price of altcoins was artificially high. So I bought several altcoins, and they doubled in just a few days. I originally wanted to stop while I was ahead, but every time I sold, I couldn't help but grit my teeth and continue to add to the market when I saw the price of the currency continue to rise. Fortunately, I had just started working at that time and my financial ability was limited. In total, I only put a few thousand yuan in the currency market.

In June 2017, the company decided to start listing a new currency called "ICOcoin" on the exchange.

Mr. An later told me that this decision surprised many people in the company at the time. After all, among the top exchanges, our company is also famous for its cautious and conservative trading decisions.

There is a saying in the cryptocurrency circle, "Bitcoin is gold, Litecoin is silver", which means that Bitcoin and Litecoin are relatively mature in technology and have a complete ecosystem, making them more trustworthy. The company exchange has long supported only the trading of these two currencies. But now a new currency that has never been heard of is suddenly listed, which makes everyone feel a little incredible.

Later they found out that the issuer of this "ICOcoin" was actually the team that started a second business after the original founder of our company left. Therefore, this unexpected decision was more or less due to this relationship.

Similar to other new coins, ICOcoin went online at an issue price of around 2.3 yuan, and then only experienced a short period of decline and sideways trading. Soon the price began to rise steadily, and by the end of August, the price of the coin had more than doubled fivefold. It is said that during that period, the transaction fees collected by the company were once more than those obtained from the Bitcoin and Litecoin markets.

However, the good times did not last long. Around September 2017, the second heavy blow of government regulation came.

On September 4, 2017, the central bank and seven other ministries and commissions issued another ban, completely prohibiting the trading of digital currencies in China, and at the same time defining the crowdfunding of tokens before the initial issuance of digital currencies as illegal fundraising. For a time, the entire cryptocurrency circle was in a state of panic, and the waterfall of copycat coins plummeted on the spot, and those "air coins" that were originally created to defraud money took the opportunity to run away with the money. After only a few days, the copycat coins that I once bought for thousands of yuan had fallen to less than 300 yuan.

ICOcoin, which was just listed for trading not long ago, was also doomed. Although in order to warn of risks and prevent market collapse, the exchange issued a notice on September 2 to suspend ICOcoin recharge and trading services, and reminded ICOcoin investors to exit and withdraw as soon as possible. However, according to the spirit of the "9.4" seven ministries and commissions of the country, "new coins that have completed ICO financing and issued must be cleared", so most ICOcoins still could not escape the fate of being cleared.

Teacher An said that in the last few months before she left the company, she only had one thing to do every day, which was to call customers one by one, convert the digital currencies they left in the exchange into RMB according to the market price, and return them to their bank accounts. The withdrawal of Bitcoin and Litecoin is not difficult, and customers usually transfer the currency to overseas exchanges very quickly. The problem still lies with ICOcoin.

Because ICOcoin officially decided to liquidate ICOcoin at a private placement price of 0.9 yuan per unit, which was far below users' expectations, customers were very resistant to the liquidation. "You know, many users actually bought at high prices like 8 or 9 yuan, and now they are only paid 90 cents after liquidation. Many customers were very emotional on the phone... They said that they couldn't explain this price to their families. But... we had no choice."

"For more than a month, they cursed us online, including at our exchange, and directly called us scammers. Some customers even came directly to the company. At that time, we hired a few security guards to guard the company's door during office hours every day. We even had to ask them to escort us when we went out to the toilet," she added.

6

During dinner that day, we talked about Adi and Xiaojie again. Teacher An said that Adi had left Shanghai and returned to Guangzhou. After the company was acquired, as an old employee, he received a lot of severance pay, plus the money he made from working with big companies before, it should be enough for him to live freely for a long time; while Xiaojie, who is more active in thinking, turned around and started his own business: he brought in some colleagues and friends he knew before, and formed a small team to develop a digital currency wallet. I heard that the operation is pretty good. At several recent blockchain conferences in Shanghai, he can often be seen.

Yang Zhe, who was more well-informed, left the company even earlier, long before the government issued the ban. For him, who had studied in Japan in his early years and had many connections in Tokyo, Japan, which had long recognized the legality of Bitcoin, was undoubtedly a better choice. Before leaving, he treated me to a meal, and he said, "The company has been in trouble for a long time," during the meal.

Yang Zhe said that in fact, the company's management had lost interest in operating the company earlier and just wanted to sell the company quickly and get the money and leave. In the first half of 2017, he once helped the company with a connection. At that time, the legal status of Bitcoin had just been established in Japan, and the business representative of DMM18 (Japan's largest online adult seller) found the company through Yang Zhe, hoping to buy the company's mining pool naming rights. But at that meeting, the company's CEO put forward a proposal that the Japanese side could not accept at all.

"They said they no longer wanted to operate the business and wanted only 7.2 billion yen to take the entire company." Yang Zhe repeated this to me, half with disdain and half with helplessness.

Later, I told this story to Teacher An. Teacher An smiled noncommittally at first, and then said after a moment: "In fact, they started thinking about this in 2016, so - who would be surprised?"

"The company has not made any money in the past few years - whether it was charging holding fees or later transaction fees. The company's expenses are quite high, and it has always been supported by venture capital money, and it really can't find a way to make a profit." Teacher An sighed, "So they don't want to continue. I really miss the previous few years, but what's the point of missing them now?"

It was then that I realized that many things that slowly became public secrets after I left were actually foreshadowed long before. Somehow, I remembered the orange "mint" that Mr. An gave me when I joined the company. I heard that as a rare commemoration of my old employer, it has been sold at a price far higher than the price of the coin it contains in the small circle, but I think I will probably never open it again.

end

After the acquisition, most of my former colleagues left the company. Later, I heard that the old founder bought the company back and moved the entire team to Hangzhou. In addition to operating overseas exchanges, they also do "innovative transactions such as digital currency custody and loans."

Later, Teacher An asked me on WeChat and pulled me into a WeChat group. It was the new company she joined. I looked through the company profile and was a service provider that "provides blockchain technology financial solutions and exports blockchain technology". There is no doubt that he is still a member of the currency circle company.

"It's not easy for people in this circle to leave." I remembered what Teacher An said to me before. So, among the people who are familiar with me, I should be the only one who actually left the currency circle in the end.

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