Long Fan, director of TreeGraph Blockchain Research Institute: I once bought 100 bitcoins for $1,000, but I no longer hold them

Recently, Long Fan, the president of Shanghai Shutu Blockchain Research Institute and the founder of Shutu, shared his early experience with Bitcoin in an exclusive interview with Xinmin Weekly, which attracted widespread attention in the industry.

Long Fan revealed that during his doctoral studies at MIT, he invested $1,000 in his personal name to purchase 100 Bitcoins, and the unit price was about $10 per coin at that time. However, due to uncertainty about the future value of digital assets, he sold all of them when the price rose to $50 per coin. Long Fan admitted in the interview: "At that time, I just felt novel, and I didn't know that it would reach this point in the future." Today, the price of Bitcoin has long exceeded the $100,000 mark, and this experience has become a "regrettable" memory in his life.

According to mainstream market data, as of June 2025, the price of Bitcoin fluctuated between $103,000 and $108,000, and has risen by more than 40% this year, setting a new record high. Against the backdrop of global inflation and structural reshaping of the financial system, crypto assets continue to gain favor with traditional institutional investors, which has also promoted the rapid evolution of related technologies and ecosystems.

As a technical representative in China's blockchain field, Long Fan has shifted his focus to infrastructure research and development and Web3 ecosystem construction in recent years. The TreeGraph Blockchain Research Institute he founded focuses on the integration of graph computing and decentralized protocols, and is committed to providing high-performance architecture for the next-generation blockchain platform.

In the interview, Long Fan also said that although he missed the long-term value of Bitcoin in the early days, he always believed that the core of blockchain technology is not just token trading, but changing the transmission logic of information and value. "What we do is more basic, which is the infrastructure that can be continuously iterated and empower the future digital economy."

Industry insiders pointed out that Long Fan's experience highlights the huge transformation of blockchain technology from grassroots experiments to mainstream global financial assets. From academic explorer to industry practitioner, Long Fan himself has also experienced the transformation from "Bitcoin investor" to "blockchain architect", representing a part of the true silhouette of Chinese technical talents in the global Web3 wave.