In September 2018 Ahn Si-hu walked away from a corporate-engineer salary of roughly sixty million Korean won a year. Two years later, in 2020, he was on a Bybit leaderboard as captain of W.T.C, the team that won the inaugural WSOT. In 2021 he came back as captain of "YouTube Maeuknam" — 2,044.90% team PnL, the first prize of 840,000 USDT, and the brand name that would carry his next four years of public trading. By 2022 his squad was the largest in the WSOT field, 3,241 traders deep, and Korean retail had a new face for what disciplined leveraged crypto looks like.

The brand's pillar is transparency — wins and losses both go on YouTube, and the channel name renamed itself in 2026 to "MAEUKNAM — The man who makes a million a month" for an English audience. The trade thesis on Bitcoin he keeps coming back to is the classic digital-gold framing, but the execution is closer to standard Korean retail-perp playbook: moving averages, RSI, support-resistance zones, broad macro overlays. His own published rule, in Hankyung's 2021 interview: "Buy cheap when people doubt, sell dear when they're certain."

Off the screens he runs two Gangnam restaurants, two IT companies, and a small real-estate development practice. The 2023 WSOT did not go well: Bybit disqualified him mid-event and he has been publicly disputing the disqualification ever since, with Bybit declining to comment beyond directing to legal channels. By his own count he is the only trader to have won five world-cup-style competitions; the public record cleanly supports the 2021 WSOT first place, the 2021 Phemex #1, and the 2022 Bitget #1, with the rest depending on how teams and individual brackets get rolled up.