Angel Investor Amassed 10,000 Bitcoins Amid Q1 Price Slump

Cai Wensheng, an angel investor from China and chairman of photo retouching app provider Meitu, says he has achieved his goal of accruing 10,000 bitcoins.

In an open group Q&A session with tech entrepreneur Wang Feng on WeChat on Thursday, Cai disclosed that although he was holding a single bitcoin in January of this year, he moved to increase his portfolio over the first quarter of 2018 amid the bearish market's lower prices.

Soon after December's record high round $20,000, the price of bitcoin started dropping in January.

According to CoinDesk's Bitcoin Price Index, Cai's holdings are now worth around $96 million.

"I only had single digit unit of bitcoin, just for fun in January. But when I got certain that bitcoin and blockchain is the future, I set the goal of holding 10,000 bitcoin. So I started around end of January to build my [holdings] following the price decline. The more it dropped, the more I bought in and now the mission is basically complete."

Born in the 1970s, Cai made his name and first fortune by investing in domain names during the internet bubble and expanded his investment portfolio over the next decade as an angel investor.

His current venture, Meitu, a popular photo retouching tool in China that claims to have over 90 million monthly active users, went public in Hong Kong in December 2016 with a valuation of $5 billion at the time.

Cai's disclosure makes him one of the few big-name investors in China to have openly disclosed their bitcoin holdings.

It also comes at a time when Meitu is aiming to utilize blockchain technology to decentralize storage of users' data, according to a white paper published in January.

CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.