July 11th, capital city.
The work station of Wang Shuo is at the innermost side of the "ChainNews" editorial department.
The walls are covered with cryptocurrency historical price charts and API interface documents of major exchanges.
He has been the editor-in-chief of this Blockchain vertical media for three years, and has met countless people who are known as "Bitcoin's richest people"--
Some people have posted screenshots of exchanges, and some have shown their wallet addresses.
But no one has ever dared to put all his transaction records in the sun.
Let any knowledgeable person in the world verify it step by step.
Late last night, when he saw the Bloomberg news on Twitter, he thought he had read it wrong.
Era Vanguard--the offshore fund that holds more than 10% of the shares of Tesla and Nvidia--
A complete Bitcoin transaction record was submitted to the SEC.
He immediately opened EDGAR System, spent more than three hours downloading all the attachments of the four files, and then flipped through the pages one by one.
When he turned to the second volume, the Red Bull can in his hand almost fell on the keyboard.
Coinbase and Bitfinex institutional account statements, each transaction is accompanied by a timestamp and transaction hash.
It can be verified directly on the Blockchain browser.
Electronic seal of the exchange, cross-border transfer certificate of the bank, registration document of Offshore SPV--
In the eyes of people in the currency circle, these things are more convincing than a hundred interviews.
Wang Shuo stayed up all night, comparing all the transaction timelines in the attachment with the historical pending order prices of Coinbase and Bitfinex, segment by segment.
He found that what was really amazing about this material was not just the precise timing of Zhao Chen opening a position at 800 US Dollar and clearing it at 17,000 US Dollar -
What is even more speechless than his accuracy is that he actually did it in a period like the end of 2016 when there were almost no licensed and compliant exchanges in Asia.
Every handling fee and intermediary bank deduction for every cross-border wire transfer are documented on paper.
He took screenshots of a few key charts and began writing the longest analysis article of his career.
On the same day, Magic City.
Reporter Lin Wei of "First Finance" received an email from the New York branch. The attachment is the Chinese translation of Bloomberg's in-depth report and several key attachment excerpts.
She spent the whole morning translating the timeline disclosed in the SEC attachment into Chinese, and then opened Wind Terminal,
Call up the price trend chart of Bitcoin from the end of 2016 to the end of 2017, and change the position opening window of Zhao Chen,
Swing Trading window and clearance window are marked in red, blue and green, and they all match.
She posted this picture in the middle of the article and added a line of comments next to it--
"Zhao Chen entered the market when Bitcoin was eight hundred US Dollar and left when it was nearly seventeen thousand US Dollar.
The entire trading cycle lasted about thirteen months, and the peak position reached about 550,000 pieces."
At the same time, in an office building on Beijing Financial Street,
The editor-in-chief of a new Financial Media is dismantling the verification analysis of Reuters.
He marked the bank transfer vouchers and exchange statements mentioned in the attachment one by one, and sent a group message to the editorial department--
"Look carefully at these transfer times: before the end of 2016, his transaction fee orders were all paper scans.
Electronic statements only began to appear in early 2017.
This watershed moment coincides with the domestic banking system's tightening of compliance with cross-border Digital Currency funds.
Zhao Chen didn't just passively adapt to regulation back then. He predicted in advance that regulation would be tightened.
So every step is taken to complete the chain of evidence before the floodgate closes."
In the afternoon of the same day, the headlines of several domestic headlines Financial Media almost simultaneously changed to the same theme.
The title of ChainNews's in-depth article directly points out the core discovery--
"The Archeology of Cryptocurrency in the SEC Annex: How Zhao Chen Completed the Ten-Billion-level Bitcoin Layout in a Compliance Vacuum".
In the manuscript, Wang Shuo restored every step of Zhao Chen's position building to the extremely imperfect cross-border Crypto Asset transfer channel at the time--
That was an era when even a formal institutional account system had not yet been established.
And Zhao Chen keeps paper and electronic statements from beginning to end,
It fills the archival gap in the regulatory vacuum of private offshore funds in the field of Crypto Asset.
The title of "First Finance" is cut from another angle--
"From 500 million Hong Kong Dollar to nearly 8 billion US Dollar: The complete footprint left by a China young man on Bitcoin".
In her report, Lin Wei made a lot of comparisons of transaction-by-transaction timelines with RMB exchange rates and cross-border handling fees.
Finally, we came to the conclusion--Zhao Chen's operation on Bitcoin had no luck from the beginning.
Throughout the afternoon, several reports continued to circulate on social networks.
The financial circle and Blockchain circle were exploded at the same time.
A senior entrepreneur in the Blockchain industry commented when forwarding ChainNews's report on Weibo:
"At the end of 2016, there were not even a few formal exchanges in China that supported institutional accounts.
The institutional channels of Coinbase and Bitfinex were extremely unfriendly to Asia users at that time.
Cash withdrawals, cross-border remittances, handling fees - everything is 10,000 times more troublesome than it is now.
Zhao Chen is walking out of a mudslide on a paved road."
Another early Bitcoin investor wrote more directly in Moments:
"Back then we were all trading with personal accounts, and those who could double their profits were already considered masters.
This person used 500 million Hong Kong Dollar as seeds, built a position in more than 800 US Dollar, and cleared nearly 17,000 US Dollar -
What's even more terrifying is that he actually kept the bank receipts for every handling fee.
This shows that he was not speculating from the beginning, he was doing something that he knew very well how big the scale would be and that sooner or later he would be censored."
In the evening, several traditional Financial Media also joined the report one after another.
"Economic Observer" linked Zhao Chen's Bitcoin transaction record with Era Vanguard's position logic on Nvidia and Tesla in an in-depth review.
It is pointed out that this initial capital of approximately 7.94 billion US Dollar has now expanded to a management scale of more than 30 billion US Dollar.
"China Business Journal" started from the perspective of compliance and interviewed a former member of the Central Bank Digital Currency research team.
The other party stated that the completeness of this attachment "is sufficient to serve as a reference example for anti-money laundering compliance in the global Crypto Asset field."
At nine o'clock in the evening, the lights in the ChainNews editorial office were still on.
Wang Shuo leaned back in his chair and drank his fourth can of Red Bull tonight. Bloomberg Terminal was still updating follow-up comments and reports.
His colleague poked his head over from the workstation next to him - "The reading volume of our archeology article has exceeded one million."
Wang Shuo looked at the rising numbers on the screen,
Suddenly I remembered a small detail I noticed when flipping through the attachments in the early morning - the last page of the clearance summary table.
After Zhao Chen deducted all taxes and fees, he transferred the profits to Cayman Islands's account. There were only three words written in the remarks column, "Seed Lands."
At the time, he thought it was a casual comment.
Now he chewed these two words silently in his mouth several times.
"You know, he arranged all the attachments in chronological order into four stages, each with a separate cross-reference number."
He turned to his colleagues and said,
"This is not material that was hastily added after being investigated. It was prepared several years ago and is waiting for the investigation to come to us."