At the beginning of 2026, a six-year-long lawsuit was finally settled. Thunder and Wangxin Technology filed civil lawsuits against Chen Lei and his core team, accusing them of damaging the company's interests, with claims totaling 200 million yuan. The Shenzhen court has officially accepted the case.

This is not a sudden dispute. The root cause can be traced back to 2020—Chen Lei was accused of embezzling company assets through fictitious transactions, forged contracts, and other means, and misappropriated tens of millions of yuan to engage in illegal cryptocurrency trading activities. To evade investigation, he chose to go abroad in early April 2020 and remained overseas for a long time, which temporarily halted criminal investigations due to difficulties in gathering evidence.

From a tech genius to the spotlight of controversy, Chen Lei's story itself illustrates the issue well. He started coding in high school, was admitted to Tsinghua University's Computer Science Department, honed his skills at Google and Microsoft, and then returned to China to join Tencent—this resume is a textbook example of a tech elite.

When he became Thunder's CTO in 2014, the company was under the shadow of declining download business. Chen Lei's expertise in distributed computing and cloud computing perfectly matched Thunder's P2P download technology DNA. Between 2015 and 2017, he gradually rose to co-CEO, and in July 2017, he finally took the position of CEO and director.

Just at this critical juncture, the global blockchain wave swept in, and the price of Bitcoin soared... We have all seen the second half of this story.