Many early participants probably still remember the project called "Wanke Cloud." It was once the hottest concept in the distributed storage track—more popular than many similar projects at the time, after all, Web2 had a large user base and broader market imagination.

The model of Wanke Cloud is actually simple: buy a hardware device, connect it to the internet and a hard drive, contribute bandwidth and storage space, and earn LinkToken as a reward. At first glance, it looks like a mining device, but it’s wrapped in the guise of "shared computing." From late 2017 to 2018, it indeed attracted quite a bit of attention.

How hot was it back then? The price of LinkToken soared from a few cents to over ten yuan, and the hardware devices were also hyped up to ridiculous levels—originally costing a few hundred yuan, Wanke Cloud devices were once traded in the second-hand market for thousands of yuan. Early entrants definitely made money, but after a large influx of capital, more people became bagholders. Coupled with gradually tightening regulations, the project was halted after 2018.

Recently, this project has made headlines again, mainly because of the former CEO of Xunlei, Chen Lei. Reports say he is suspected of embezzling tens of millions of dollars from the company to illegally trade cryptocurrencies, and LinkToken was one of the projects promoted by Xunlei back then. Chen Lei has already gone overseas.

This case is quite interesting; it reflects a typical lifecycle of certain projects: good concept + market hype + speculation + regulatory intervention + project decline. For current investors, these lessons are valuable textbooks—no matter how appealing the story, it cannot withstand regulation and bubble bursts.