From Deification to Demolition: The Former CEO of Xunlei's 200 Million Corruption and Escape Story

Author: Maosike

Original Title: “Playful Cloud” Godfather Escapes Overseas, Former Thunderbolt CEO Chen Lei’s 200 Million Corruption Mystery

January 15, 2026, Shenzhen.

A civil lawsuit has been filed by the court, seeking to recover up to 200 million yuan. The name on the defendant’s list feels like a different lifetime—former Thunder CEO Chen Lei, the man whose leadership once caused Thunder’s stock price to soar fivefold in a month, has now become the protagonist of a “corruption and embezzlement scheme.”

He is suspected of misappropriating tens of millions of company funds for cryptocurrency trading, arranging for relatives to fabricate contracts within the company to siphon off funds… In Thunder’s statement, Chen Lei is accused of “multiple crimes.”

Rewind to October 31, 2017, also in Shenzhen, at the launch event of Wangxin Technology, where the lights are dazzling. Chen Lei, dressed in his signature white shirt, stands on stage and announces with his characteristic techie tone: “Thunder will go all-in on blockchain,” eliciting thunderous applause from the audience.

From deifying to destroying, only a few short years have passed.

This is the story of a once-treasured prodigy falling from grace.

The Arrival of a Genius

“I met Lei Jun in September 2014. He invited me to join Thunder, and we talked until after 2 a.m.” Years later, Chen Lei recalls that night that changed his destiny.

At that time, Chen Lei was a star executive at Tencent Cloud, a veteran in the cloud computing field. Thunder, meanwhile, was a giant in download tools that was showing signs of fatigue in the mobile internet era, desperately needing a tech-savvy, bold leader to steer its transformation.

Lei Jun convinced him, giving two irresistible reasons: “You’re doing pretty well at Tencent, but who is better—yourself or Tencent? Can you still do so well after leaving Tencent?” The second question: “Do you want to run a company where you call the shots?”

“I was deeply moved by Lei Jun’s proposal. I felt he understood my heart and spoke my mind. At that time, I admired Lei Jun very much.”

Zou Shenglong, founder of Thunder, offered very sincere conditions: he would serve as CTO of Thunder while also becoming CEO of the newly established Wangxin Technology. The founding of Wangxin Technology coincided almost exactly with Chen Lei’s joining, meaning he would have a relatively independent entrepreneurial platform.

Chen Lei’s ambitions went far beyond running an ordinary cloud computing company. With the rise of the sharing economy in 2014, Chen keenly realized that reconstructing cloud architecture through sharing could innovate CDN technology, especially addressing the industry’s long-standing issues of “high cost, chaos, and poor quality.”

“The core value of Wangxin Technology is to build an IDC based on sharing economy, reducing social computing costs through sharing,” Chen Lei said. Using smart hardware “Money Maker,” ordinary users could share their idle bandwidth for profit, and Wangxin Technology would integrate these resources into CDN services.

The speed of turning this idea into reality was astonishing.

In June 2015, Wangxin Technology launched Xingyu CDN, priced directly at three-quarters of the mainstream market price, quickly establishing partnerships with Xiaomi, iQiyi, Zhanchiji, and other top companies.

By the end of 2015, Chen Lei was awarded the “Outstanding Person of the Year in the Internet Industry” for leading Wangxin Technology to innovate CDN technology.

By 2017, Xingyu Cloud’s shared computing model had over 1.5 million nodes online, with about 30TB of reserved bandwidth and approximately 1500PB of storage. This was an unprecedented distributed computing network, successfully connecting thousands of households into a cloud network.

A perfect blend of technological idealism and business success, he seemed to have found the right way to change the world.

In July 2017, Chen Lei officially became CEO of Thunder.

But behind the glamorous success, a complex situation was brewing. “Old Zou (Zou Shenglong) wanted to do an MBO (Management Buyout), but there was a disagreement with the major shareholders. In the end, this couldn’t be reconciled, and I was pushed forward as CEO. I was a bit scared at the time, thinking this position might not be good,” Chen Lei later recalled.

But history soon proved that this was just the calm before the storm. A bigger opportunity—or temptation—was beckoning.

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 ICOs surged in March and April 2017. Bitcoin regained its upward momentum, doubling from $968 at the start of the year to $3,000, while Ethereum rose from $8.3 to over $200, more than twentyfold.

Various forms of ICOs flooded the market. The booming virtual currency market inspired Chen Lei with blockchain ideas.

“Thunder is fundamentally a P2P technology-based, decentralized internet company. From its core, Thunder’s focus on shared computing has a better chance of success than others,” Chen Lei once said. Unlike B2C models of other companies, Thunder hoped to carve out a unique C2B path leveraging blockchain technology.

Under Chen Lei’s push, Thunder’s blockchain version of Money Maker—“Playful Cloud”—was born.

Playful Cloud borrowed Bitcoin’s POW algorithm, allowing “mining” to generate digital assets called Playful Coins, with a total supply of 1.5 billion, halving every 365 days, with mining output decreasing by half each year.

This design was considered “perfect”: it had physical hardware as a carrier, tied to actual computing services. Playful Coin was a native digital asset within the Playful Cloud shared computing ecosystem, closely linked to the hardware and economic applications of shared CDN.

Chen Lei framed this project as a “shared computing + blockchain” technological innovation, rather than just a simple virtual currency issuance, thus avoiding ICO policy risks while enjoying the market hype around blockchain.

On October 31, 2017, Playful Cloud was officially launched.

Chen Lei announced open sharing of computing services to all individual users, launching the “Cloud Disk Mining” and Playful Rewards programs. Playful Coins could be exchanged within Thunder’s ecosystem for over 200 value-added services, such as expandable storage and Thunder memberships.

The market reaction exceeded all expectations. At that time, blockchain concepts were extremely hot, and Playful Coin’s price skyrocketed. On some trading platforms, it rose from an unofficial price of 0.1 yuan to 9 yuan, a 90-fold increase.

Playful Cloud was regarded as a mining machine, with each unit priced from 338 yuan to a peak of 3,240 yuan. It also caused Thunder’s stock price to increase fivefold within a month. In October 2017, Thunder’s stock soared from $4.28 to $24.91, reaching a high of $27.

“Playful Cloud, one unit at 599, netting a profit of 1500.”

Some players reported that early participants in Playful Cloud Taobao crowdfunding, using抢单 software and hiring interns to stockpile, earned their first fortune in 2017 through Playful Cloud. Some individual users participating in the rewards plan mined daily and earned dozens of Playful Coins, recouping their investment in just a few days.

“Thanks to Thunder’s Playful Cloud, I learned about Bitcoin and blockchain, opening the door to a new world,” said Jack, a cryptocurrency professional based in Hong Kong, to TechFlow.

This was Chen Lei’s peak moment, and also the most glorious period in Thunder’s history.

The tech idealist successfully transformed a traditional download tool company into a trendy blockchain concept stock, with market value multiplying several times.

But beneath the shiny surface, a crisis was brewing.

The craze for Playful Coins had long deviated from Chen Lei’s original vision, evolving from technological innovation into pure speculative frenzy.

The Coming Crisis

Crises often start from within.

On November 28, 2017, Shenzhen Thunder Data Information Service Co., Ltd. publicly pointed out that Thunder CEO Chen Lei was involved in illegal issuance of Playful Cloud, which did not use any blockchain technology and was a disguised ICO through illegal exchanges.

This seemingly “self-report” was actually a direct conflict between old and new forces within Thunder.

“That internal conflict in Thunder in October 2017 was actually initiated by Yu Fei (former senior vice president of Thunder), and the core demand was to push me out,” Chen Lei later recalled.

On November 3, the People’s Bank of China, considering Playful Coin as a product of Thunder’s financial sector, summoned responsible person Hu Jie. After explanation, it was understood to be Wangxin’s business. Hu Jie then submitted an email to Thunder’s senior management, stating that Playful Coin was not based on real blockchain technology, had potential disguised ICO issues, and risked inducing and supporting trading, with potential for group incidents.

On December 9, 2017, Playful Coin was renamed “Lian Ke.”

Before internal conflicts were resolved, external regulatory blows struck.

In January 2018, the China Internet Finance Association issued a risk warning, stating that virtual digital assets issued via IMO models like Lian Ke were essentially a form of financing, a disguised ICO.

On the night of the association’s notice, Thunder’s stock plummeted 27.38% at market open, and Lian Ke’s price also dropped sharply.

On January 16 and 17, 2018, Thunder issued consecutive announcements on its official website, stating that Lian Ke would be fully integrated into Thunder’s points system, and from January 31, only allowing users to use Lian Ke within Thunder and partner applications to dispel ICO suspicions.

Following the announcement, Lian Ke’s price halved from 4 yuan to 2.5 yuan.

Due to regulatory attention, searching for Playful Cloud on platforms like Xianyu showed violation notices, and hardware cloud disks were referred to as “wky” or “mother hen” by sellers.

On September 17, 2018, Thunder announced the sale of blockchain businesses including Lian Ke, Lian Ke Mall, and Lian Ke Pocket to a tech group.

By the end of 2018, the official price of Playful Cloud was 599 yuan, but on secondhand platforms, many units were resold at prices as low as 40 yuan. The huge gap between official and secondhand prices made the Playful Cloud model unsustainable.

Investors voiced their anger. “Playful Cloud is the worst thing I’ve bought in five years.” Some users publicly protested online, as the once-profitable mining machines turned into scrap overnight.

The former star CEO became a target of criticism, and media that once praised him began questioning his motives and abilities.

The myth of deification shattered, but the story of destruction was far from over.

The Demise of the Deity

After the Playful Coin frenzy subsided, a company called “Xing Ronghe” quietly emerged. Founded in 2018, it appeared to be a Thunder bandwidth supplier on the surface, but its actual controller was Chen Lei himself.

Chen Lei explained: “In February 2017, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued regulations to clean up non-compliant market transactions, explicitly requiring bandwidth to be purchased only from licensed companies. We shifted from buying bandwidth from households to buying from miners. To avoid risks from Wangxin, we bought a shell company called Xing Ronghe, which purchased hardware from Wangxin and resold it to miners. This way, we isolated the risks from Wangxin.”

Chen Lei emphasized that the business and capital flows of Xing Ronghe were closely linked to Thunder, all for the company’s benefit.

However, Thunder’s internal investigation revealed a more complicated picture. From January 2019 to early 2020, Wangxin paid Xing Ronghe about 170 million yuan for resource node procurement.

The most dramatic episode occurred between March 31 and April 1, 2020. Chen Lei, then CEO of Thunder and CEO of Wangxin, used his final approval authority to authorize multiple payments totaling over 20 million yuan to Xing Ronghe within just two days.

Some payments were made before the normal payment deadlines, showing a rapid “same-day submission, approval, and receipt” process without proper acceptance or settlement procedures.

Within 24 hours, on April 2, Thunder’s board issued a statement removing Chen Lei from his CEO position.

Chen Lei vividly remembered the process: “On April 2, around 10:00, I was at home with a fever and didn’t go to the office. But colleagues told me that a bunch of security guards in white rushed into the office, ordering everyone to stop all work. This happened before any communication with me. I had no idea about any of this before it happened.”

Besides financial transfers, Thunder also accused Chen Lei of personnel poaching before his removal.

In March 2020, Chen Lei arranged Dong Dui and Liu Chao to meet with 35 core employees, encouraging them to resign collectively and transfer to Xing Ronghe. This directly led Wangxin to pay over 9 million yuan in severance and stock repurchase.

Even more bizarre was the control structure behind Xing Ronghe: legal representative Zhao Yuqin was Liu Chao’s mother; shareholder Tian Weihong of “Hong En Technology” was Dong Dui’s mother; legal person Xu Yanling was related to Dong Dui and Chen Lei’s driver Yao Bingwen; Chen Lei and Dong Dui had a son together, forming a close利益共同体.

In April 2020, shortly after Chen Lei’s removal, he left China. On October 8 of the same year, Thunder announced that former CEO Chen Lei was suspected of occupational embezzlement and had been under investigation by Shenzhen Public Security Bureau, calling on him to “return to China promptly for cooperation.”

Over six years, Thunder’s efforts to recover rights and pursue legal action faced serious evidence collection obstacles because Chen Lei was overseas. Among five cases related to Wangxin and Xing Ronghe, multiple notices mentioned “defendant whereabouts unknown, court using publication service.”

By the end of 2022, due to objective limitations, the police withdrew the case after failing to obtain sufficient evidence. Criminal prosecution was temporarily halted, but civil claims had just begun.

On January 15, 2026, after more than five years, Thunder and its subsidiary Wangxin Technology reinitiated civil litigation, seeking to recover up to 200 million yuan. The case has now been accepted and filed by a Shenzhen court.

The list of defendants is long: Chen Lei, Dong Dui, Liu Chao, Zhao Yuqin, as well as Xing Ronghe and its related shareholders. The 200 million yuan claim includes approximately 170 million yuan paid to Xing Ronghe for resource procurement, plus about 28 million yuan in other discrepancies.

Epilogue

“I may have committed many taboos of professional managers, and indeed offended some people,”

“Too naive,”

“Do you ask me if I regret moving from Tencent Cloud to Thunder? How could I not regret? I shouldn’t have been CEO in 2017—that was a feud with the old team.”

This was Chen Lei’s self-reflection in 2020.

But once power is in hand, it’s hard to let go. When technological innovation intertwines with capital speculation and personal ambition, the result is often disastrous.

Chen Lei’s story is a mirror reflecting the complexity and multifaceted nature of China’s internet industry development. Innovation and speculation coexist, idealism and realism clash, regulation lags behind market frenzy.

In this rapidly changing era, everyone can be a beneficiary of the trend or a sacrifice in history. Chen Lei was once a lucky one chosen by the times, but ultimately abandoned by it.

In the game of technology and capital, maintaining original intentions is more difficult than achieving success, and perhaps the only way to survive cycles and avoid destruction is to stay true to oneself.

The cycle of deification and destruction will continue, but hopefully next time, we can learn more from it.