#fcoin
fcoin
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At one point, this exchange handled more trading volume than six exchanges combined, including Binance, Huobi and OKEx. In the end, its founder posted an open letter on the official website saying it couldn’t pay out 7,000 to 13,000 bitcoins.
Even today, if you visit FCoin’s website, the page is still stuck on “Under Maintenance.” This happened in February 2020.
I read that open letter and went through the announcements from February 10 to 17, day by day. Both were published by the platform itself, and they’re all I’m using here.
Just how hot was it back then? FCoin launched in May 2018. Its platform token, FT, rose about 100-fold from its private sale price to its peak, topping 8 yuan. More than 80 exchanges later copied its “trade-to-mine” model.
The model wasn’t hard to understand. Users could mine FT by trading, and the platform would distribute 80% of its revenue as dividends. The tokens they mined earned dividends, and those dividends could be used to buy more tokens and mine again. It looked as if everyone was making money.
For this cycle to keep turning, a steady stream of new trades had to come in to cover the dividends owed to earlier users. The faster FT rose, the more money would have to be put in later.
Then came those eight days. On February 10, FCoin announced a temporary shutdown for maintenance, saying it expected the work to take 4 hours. That same day, the platform announced that it would burn all the FT held by the team: more than 720 million tokens.
On the 11th, the announcement changed: a system vulnerability had been found, and recovery would take one to two days. On the 12th, it changed again: key team members were unreachable, the data was severely damaged, and users could apply to withdraw by email. On the 17th, Zhang Jian published the letter “The Truth About FCoin.”
In the letter, he wrote that the biggest problem wasn’t that the system couldn’t be restored, but that the reserves couldn’t cover users’ withdrawal requests. He estimated the shortfall at 7,000 to 13,000 BTC, worth about 475 million to 883 million yuan at the time. He attributed it to data errors and poor decisions, ruling out both a hack and an exit scam. He ended the letter with eight words: “I will take responsibility for this for the rest of my life.”
Someone in a group for people seeking compensation wrote at the time: “I lost over 700,000 yuan, nearly 400,000 of it borrowed. I can’t make this month’s mortgage payment either.”
My takeaway is that what’s worth remembering about this model isn’t any one person. Trade-to-mine turned the platform’s liabilities into the value of the tokens users held. As long as the token price held up, things were fine; when it didn’t, the debt came due all at once. In the years that followed, the same script played out elsewhere. In August 2025, one exchange was directly compared to FCoin by the media.
What I can’t determine is where that money went. The open letter said it wasn’t an exit scam. Later, an on-chain analysis claimed that most of the funds in a publicly disclosed wallet address flowed to other exchanges. I can’t independently verify either claim.
The compensation Zhang promised was to be paid over one to three years. To this day, there has been no public accounting.
If you’d like to see the rest of this series, follow me.
$BTC $ETH $HT #币圈往事 #FCoin #TradeToMine
At one point, this exchange handled more trading volume than six exchanges combined, including Binance, Huobi and OKEx. In the end, its founder posted an open letter on the official website saying it couldn’t pay out 7,000 to 13,000 bitcoins.
Even today, if you visit FCoin’s website, the page is still stuck on “Under Maintenance.” This happened in February 2020.
I read that open letter and went through the announcements from February 10 to 17, day by day. Both were published by the platform itself, and they’re all I’m using here.
Just how hot was it back then? FCoin launched in May 2018. Its platform token, FT, rose about 100-fold from its private sale price to its peak, topping 8 yuan. More than 80 exchanges later copied its “trade-to-mine” model.
The model wasn’t hard to understand. Users could mine FT by trading, and the platform would distribute 80% of its revenue as dividends. The tokens they mined earned dividends, and those dividends could be used to buy more tokens and mine again. It looked as if everyone was making money.
For this cycle to keep turning, a steady stream of new trades had to come in to cover the dividends owed to earlier users. The faster FT rose, the more money would have to be put in later.
Then came those eight days. On February 10, FCoin announced a temporary shutdown for maintenance, saying it expected the work to take 4 hours. That same day, the platform announced that it would burn all the FT held by the team: more than 720 million tokens.
On the 11th, the announcement changed: a system vulnerability had been found, and recovery would take one to two days. On the 12th, it changed again: key team members were unreachable, the data was severely damaged, and users could apply to withdraw by email. On the 17th, Zhang Jian published the letter “The Truth About FCoin.”
In the letter, he wrote that the biggest problem wasn’t that the system couldn’t be restored, but that the reserves couldn’t cover users’ withdrawal requests. He estimated the shortfall at 7,000 to 13,000 BTC, worth about 475 million to 883 million yuan at the time. He attributed it to data errors and poor decisions, ruling out both a hack and an exit scam. He ended the letter with eight words: “I will take responsibility for this for the rest of my life.”
Someone in a group for people seeking compensation wrote at the time: “I lost over 700,000 yuan, nearly 400,000 of it borrowed. I can’t make this month’s mortgage payment either.”
My takeaway is that what’s worth remembering about this model isn’t any one person. Trade-to-mine turned the platform’s liabilities into the value of the tokens users held. As long as the token price held up, things were fine; when it didn’t, the debt came due all at once. In the years that followed, the same script played out elsewhere. In August 2025, one exchange was directly compared to FCoin by the media.
What I can’t determine is where that money went. The open letter said it wasn’t an exit scam. Later, an on-chain analysis claimed that most of the funds in a publicly disclosed wallet address flowed to other exchanges. I can’t independently verify either claim.
The compensation Zhang promised was to be paid over one to three years. To this day, there has been no public accounting.
If you’d like to see the rest of this series, follow me.
$BTC $ETH $HT #币圈往事 #FCoin #TradeToMine
Even today, if you visit FCoin’s website, the page is still stuck on “Under Maintenance.” This happened in February 2020.
I read that open letter and went through the announcements from February 10 to 17, day by day. Both were published by the platform itself, and they’re all I’m using here.
Just how hot was it back then? FCoin launched in May 2018. Its platform token, FT, rose about 100-fold from its private sale price to its peak, topping 8 yuan. More than 80 exchanges later copied its “trade-to-mine” model.
The model wasn’t hard to understand. Users could mine FT by trading, and the platform would distribute 80% of its revenue as dividends. The tokens they mined earned dividends, and those dividends could be used to buy more tokens and mine again. It looked as if everyone was making money.
For this cycle to keep turning, a steady stream of new trades had to come in to cover the dividends owed to earlier users. The faster FT rose, the more money would have to be put in later.
Then came those eight days. On February 10, FCoin announced a temporary shutdown for maintenance, saying it expected the work to take 4 hours. That same day, the platform announced that it would burn all the FT held by the team: more than 720 million tokens.
On the 11th, the announcement changed: a system vulnerability had been found, and recovery would take one to two days. On the 12th, it changed again: key team members were unreachable, the data was severely damaged, and users could apply to withdraw by email. On the 17th, Zhang Jian published the letter “The Truth About FCoin.”
In the letter, he wrote that the biggest problem wasn’t that the system couldn’t be restored, but that the reserves couldn’t cover users’ withdrawal requests. He estimated the shortfall at 7,000 to 13,000 BTC, worth about 475 million to 883 million yuan at the time. He attributed it to data errors and poor decisions, ruling out both a hack and an exit scam. He ended the letter with eight words: “I will take responsibility for this for the rest of my life.”
Someone in a group for people seeking compensation wrote at the time: “I lost over 700,000 yuan, nearly 400,000 of it borrowed. I can’t make this month’s mortgage payment either.”
My takeaway is that what’s worth remembering about this model isn’t any one person. Trade-to-mine turned the platform’s liabilities into the value of the tokens users held. As long as the token price held up, things were fine; when it didn’t, the debt came due all at once. In the years that followed, the same script played out elsewhere. In August 2025, one exchange was directly compared to FCoin by the media.
What I can’t determine is where that money went. The open letter said it wasn’t an exit scam. Later, an on-chain analysis claimed that most of the funds in a publicly disclosed wallet address flowed to other exchanges. I can’t independently verify either claim.
The compensation Zhang promised was to be paid over one to three years. To this day, there has been no public accounting.
If you’d like to see the rest of this series, follow me.
$BTC $ETH $HT #币圈往事 #FCoin #TradeToMine
喵本聪:
这也能开地图炮
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