Author: Musk Cat | Deep Tide TechFlow
January 15, 2026, Shenzhen.
A civil lawsuit has been filed in court, with a claim amounting to 200 million yuan. The name on the defendant's seat feels like a distant memory: former Xunlei CEO Chen Lei, the man who once saw Xunlei's stock price soar fivefold in a month, is now the central figure in a case of "corruption and embezzlement."
Accused of misappropriating tens of millions of company funds for cryptocurrency trading, and arranging for relatives to fabricate contracts within the company to siphon off funds… In Xunlei's statement, Chen Lei is described as having "numerous crimes."
Rewind to October 31, 2017, also in Shenzhen, where the launch event for Wangxin Technology was brilliantly lit. Dressed in his signature white shirt, Chen Lei stood on stage and announced in his characteristic tech-savvy tone: "Xunlei will go All in on blockchain," eliciting thunderous applause from the audience.
From a god-like figure to a fallen one, it all happened in just a few short years.
This is the story of a once-promising talent's downfall.
The Arrival of a Genius
"I met Lei Jun in September 2014. He invited me to join Xunlei, and we talked until around 2 AM." Years later, Chen Lei recalled that fateful night that changed his destiny.
At that time, Chen Lei was a star executive at Tencent Cloud, a seasoned professional in the cloud computing field. Xunlei, on the other hand, was a download tool giant showing signs of fatigue in the mobile internet era, desperately needing someone with technical expertise and boldness to lead its transformation.
Lei Jun persuaded him with two reasons that he couldn't refuse: "You're doing well at Tencent, but is it you or Tencent that's doing well? Can you do this well after leaving Tencent?" The second question was, "Do you want to run a company where you have the final say?"
"I was deeply moved by Lei Jun's proposal; I felt he could understand my heart and voice my thoughts. At that time, I admired Lei Jun immensely."
Xunlei's founder, Zou Shenglong, offered a highly sincere condition: to serve as Xunlei's CTO while also taking on the role of CEO of the newly established Wangxin Technology. The establishment of Wangxin Technology coincided almost perfectly with Chen Lei's joining, meaning he would have a relatively independent entrepreneurial platform.
Chen Lei's ambitions extended far beyond merely running an ordinary cloud computing company. With the rise of the sharing economy model in 2014, Chen Lei keenly realized that reconstructing the overall architecture of cloud computing through sharing economy methods could innovate CDN technology, particularly addressing the long-standing issues of "high costs, chaos, and poor quality" in the CDN industry.
"The core value of Wangxin Technology is that we want to create a sharing economy IDC, reducing social computing costs through sharing economy methods," Chen Lei stated, explaining that through the smart hardware "money treasure," ordinary users could share their idle bandwidth for profit, while Wangxin Technology would integrate these resources into CDN services.
The speed at which this idea transformed into reality was astonishing.
In June 2015, Wangxin Technology launched Star Domain CDN, priced directly 3/4 lower than mainstream market prices, and quickly established partnerships with outstanding companies like Xiaomi, iQIYI, and Zhanqi.
By the end of 2015, Chen Lei was awarded the "Outstanding Person of the Year in the Internet Industry" for leading Wangxin Technology in launching innovative CDN technology.
By 2017, the shared computing model of Star Domain Cloud had over 1.5 million nodes online, with a reserve bandwidth of about 30T and a storage reserve of approximately 1500PB, creating an unprecedented distributed computing network. Chen Lei successfully connected thousands of households into a cloud computing network.
The perfect combination of technological idealism and commercial success seemed to reveal the right way to change the world.
In July 2017, Chen Lei was officially promoted to CEO of Xunlei.
But beneath the halo of success, a complex situation was forming. "Old Zou (Zou Shenglong) wanted to do an MBO (management buyout), but there were disagreements with the major shareholders, and ultimately this matter could not be reconciled, which is why I was put in the CEO position. I was a bit scared at the time, thinking this position might not be good," Chen Lei later recalled.
But history would soon prove that this was just the calm before the storm. A bigger opportunity, or rather temptation, was beckoning him.
The Temptation of Issuing Coins
In 2017, if you missed Bitcoin, you missed an era.
Across the ocean in Silicon Valley, a wave of cryptocurrency ICO frenzy erupted around March and April 2017. Bitcoin regained its upward momentum, rising from $968 at the beginning of the year to $3000, while Ethereum surged from $8.3 to over $200.
Various forms of ICOs emerged one after another. The booming market for virtual currencies inspired Chen Lei to find inspiration in blockchain.
"Xunlei is essentially a decentralized internet company that started with P2P technology. From a genetic standpoint, Xunlei has a better chance of succeeding in shared computing than others," Chen Lei once stated. Unlike other companies' B2C paths, Xunlei hoped to leverage blockchain technology to carve out a unique C2B path.
Under Chen Lei's push, the blockchain version of Xunlei's money treasure, "Wankeyun," was born.
Wankeyun borrowed from Bitcoin's POW algorithm, allowing users to "mine" and generate digital assets called Wankey coins, with a total supply of 1.5 billion, halving production every 365 days, and reducing mining output by half each year.
This design was deemed "perfect," as it had physical hardware as a carrier, bound to actual computing services. Wankey coins were the native digital assets based on blockchain technology within the Wankeyun shared computing ecosystem, closely linked to the economic applications of Wankeyun's smart hardware and shared CDN.
Chen Lei packaged this project as a technological innovation of "shared computing + blockchain," rather than a simple virtual currency issuance, thus avoiding the policy risks of ICOs while enjoying the market dividends of the blockchain concept.
On October 31, 2017, Wankeyun was officially launched.
Chen Lei announced the opening of shared computing services to all ordinary individual users, officially launching the "cloud disk mining" and Wankey reward program. Wankey coins could be exchanged for more value-added services within the entire Xunlei ecosystem, such as expandable storage space, Xunlei membership, and over 200 other services.
The market's reaction exceeded everyone's expectations. At that time, the blockchain concept was extremely hot, and the price of Wankey coins soared. On some trading platforms, Wankey coins rose from the unofficial issuance price of 0.1 yuan to 9 yuan, a 90-fold increase.
Wankeyun was viewed as a mining machine, with prices for each unit skyrocketing from 338 yuan to a peak of 3240 yuan. Wankeyun also caused Xunlei's stock price to rise fivefold within a month, soaring from $4.28 in October 2017 to $24.91, and briefly reaching a high of $27.
"Wankeyun, priced at 599, nets a profit of 1500 if you grab it."
Some players reported that early participants in the Wankeyun Taobao crowdfunding project made their first pot of gold in 2017 by hoarding large quantities through order-snatching software and hiring interns, and even individual users participating in the Wankey reward program earned dozens of Wankey coins daily through mining, "recouping their investment in just a few days."
"It was because of Xunlei's Wankeyun that I learned about Bitcoin and blockchain, opening the door to a new world," said Jack, a cryptocurrency practitioner based in Hong Kong, to Deep Tide TechFlow.
This was the pinnacle of Chen Lei's life and the most glorious period in Xunlei's history.
The technological idealist successfully transformed a traditional download tool company into a trendy blockchain concept stock, multiplying its market value several times.
But beneath the glamorous surface, a crisis was brewing.
The frenzy surrounding Wankey coins had long deviated from Chen Lei's initial vision, evolving from technological innovation into pure speculative revelry.
The Crisis Arrives
Crisis often begins from within.
On November 28, 2017, Shenzhen Xunlei Big Data Information Service Co., Ltd. publicly pointed out that Xunlei CEO Chen Lei was conducting illegal issuance activities for Wankeyun, without using any blockchain technology, and utilizing illegal exchanges to conduct a disguised ICO.
This seemingly strange "self-reporting" was essentially a direct conflict between the old and new forces within Xunlei.
"The internal strife at Xunlei in October 2017 was actually initiated by Yu Fei (former senior vice president of Xunlei), with the core demand being to get me fired," Chen Lei later recalled.
On November 3, the central bank, believing Wankey coins were products of Xunlei's financial sector, summoned the responsible person, Hu Jie. After an explanation, it was clarified that it was Wangxin's business. Hu Jie subsequently submitted an email to Xunlei Group's senior management, pointing out that Wankey coins were not based on genuine blockchain technology, had the appearance of an ICO, and posed potential risks of mass incidents.
On December 9, 2017, Wankey coins were renamed to Chainke.
With internal conflicts unresolved, external regulatory blows soon fell.
In January 2018, the China Internet Finance Association issued a risk warning, stating that virtual digital assets issued under the IMO model, such as Chainke, were essentially a form of financing behavior, akin to a disguised ICO.
On the night the Internet Finance Association named Xunlei, Xunlei's stock price plummeted 27.38% at the opening, and the price of Chainke fell in response.
On January 16 and 17, 2018, Xunlei continuously released announcements on its official website, stating that Chainke would completely return to its role as a points function within the Xunlei system, deciding that starting from January 31, it would only allow users to use Chainke within applications and services provided by Xunlei and its partners, in an effort to clear the ICO suspicion.
Following Xunlei's announcement, Chainke's price halved from 4 yuan to 2.5 yuan.
Due to regulatory scrutiny, searching for Wankeyun on platforms like Xianyu displayed messages indicating violations, so sellers referred to the hardware cloud disk as "wky" or "mother hen."
On September 17, 2018, Xunlei announced it would package and sell its blockchain businesses, including Chainke, Chainke Mall, and Chainke Pocket, to a technology group.
By the end of 2018, the official price of Wankeyun was 599 yuan, but on second-hand platforms, many Wankeyun units were resold for as low as 40 yuan. The vast disparity between the official price and second-hand prices made it difficult for the Wankeyun model to continue.
Investors were outraged. "Wankeyun is truly the worst thing I've bought in five years." Some players even publicly sought to defend their rights online, as the once golden egg-laying mining machine turned into a pile of scrap metal overnight.
The once-celebrated CEO became the target of public ire, and the media that once praised him began to question his motives and abilities.
The myth of deification shattered, but the story of deconstruction was far from over.
The Moment of Deconstruction
After the frenzy surrounding Wankey coins subsided, a company named "Xingronghe" quietly emerged. Founded in 2018, this company appeared to be a bandwidth supplier for Xunlei, but the actual controller was Chen Lei himself.
Chen Lei had his own explanation: "In February 2017, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued regulations to clean up non-compliant market transactions, explicitly stating that bandwidth could only be purchased from licensed companies. We shifted from buying bandwidth directly from household users to buying it from miners. To mitigate the risks of Wangxin, we acquired the shell company Xingronghe, which purchased hardware from Wangxin and then sold it to miners. This way, we isolated the risks of Wangxin."
Chen Lei emphasized that the business flow and capital flow of Xingronghe were inseparable from Xunlei, and everything was done to serve Xunlei's interests.
However, according to the investigation results from Xunlei, the situation was not so simple. From January 2019 to early 2020, Wangxin cumulatively paid approximately 170 million yuan to Xingronghe for resource node procurement.
The most dramatic events occurred from March 31 to April 1, 2020. Chen Lei, utilizing his final authority as both CEO of Xunlei and CEO of Wangxin, approved several payments totaling over 20 million yuan to Xingronghe Company within just two days.
During these two days, some payments were made before their normal payment time, reflecting a "same-day bill of lading, same-day approval, same-day arrival" rapid mode that lacked acceptance and settlement processes.
24 hours later, on April 2, the Xunlei board officially announced the dismissal of Chen Lei from his CEO position.
Chen Lei has a clear memory of the process of his dismissal: "On April 2, around 10:00 AM, I was at home with a fever and did not go to the office. However, colleagues reported to me that a group of white-clad bodyguards stormed into the office and ordered all colleagues to stop all work. This happened before any communication with me. I was completely unaware of it all."
In addition to the fund transfers, Xunlei also accused Chen Lei of poaching personnel before his dismissal.
In March 2020, Chen Lei arranged for Dong Xue and Liu Chao to meet with 35 core employees, arranging for them to collectively resign and join Xingronghe Company. This directly led to Wangxin paying over 9 million yuan in economic compensation and option buyback payments.
Even more bizarre was the control structure behind Xingronghe: the legal representative Zhao Yuqin is Liu Chao's mother; one of the shareholders of the controlling shareholder "Hong'en Technology," Tian Weihong, is Dong Xue's mother; the legal person Xu Yanling is a relative of Dong Xue and the mother of Chen Lei's driver, Yao Bingwen; Chen Lei and Dong Xue have a son together, forming a close interest community.
In April 2020, shortly after being dismissed, Chen Lei left China. On October 8 of the same year, Xunlei announced that former CEO Chen Lei was under investigation by the Shenzhen Public Security Bureau for suspected embezzlement and called for him to "return to the country as soon as possible to cooperate with the investigation."
For six years, various recovery and rights protection actions initiated by Xunlei faced serious evidence collection obstacles due to Chen Lei being overseas. In the five cases surrounding Wangxin and Xingronghe, multiple announcements mentioned "the defendant's whereabouts are unknown, and the court has adopted public delivery methods."
By the end of 2022, due to objective limitations, the public security authorities withdrew the case after failing to obtain sufficient evidence post-filing. Criminal prosecution temporarily came to a halt, but the curtain on civil recovery had just begun to rise.
On January 15, 2026, after more than five years, Xunlei and its subsidiary Wangxin Technology refiled a civil lawsuit, seeking a recovery amount of up to 200 million yuan. The case has now been accepted and filed by the relevant court in Shenzhen.
The list of defendants is long: Chen Lei, Dong Xue, Liu Chao, Zhao Yuqin, as well as Xingronghe Company and its associated shareholders. The 200 million yuan recovery amount includes approximately 170 million yuan for purchases from Xingronghe, plus about 28 million yuan in other discrepancies.
Postscript
"I may have committed many taboos of professional managers and indeed offended some people,"
"Too naive,"
"You ask me if I regret leaving Tencent Cloud for Xunlei? How could I not regret it? I shouldn't have been CEO in 2017; it created enmity with the old team."
This was Chen Lei's self-reflection in 2020.
But once power is in hand, it is hard to let go. When technological innovation intertwines with capital speculation and personal ambition, the results are often catastrophic.
Chen Lei's story is a mirror reflecting the complexity and multifaceted nature of the development of China's internet industry. Technological innovation coexists with speculative hype, idealism clashes with realism, and regulatory lag collides with market frenzy.
In this rapidly changing era, everyone can become a beneficiary of the trend or a victim of history. Chen Lei was once a fortunate individual chosen by the times, but ultimately, he was also abandoned by them.
In the game of technology and capital, maintaining one's original intention is more difficult than achieving success, and keeping that original intention may be the only way to traverse cycles and avoid destruction.
The cycle of deification and deconstruction will continue, but hopefully next time, we can learn more from it.
References:
- "5-Year Suspended Case and 200 Million Recovery: Xunlei Resumes Lawsuit, Accusing Former CEO Chen Lei of Secretly Embezzling the Company," First Financial
- "The Story of Chen Lei's Ouster from Xunlei: White-Clad People Suddenly Arrived; Lei Jun Knew Everything," Chief Character Observation
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