Why Ruichen Wan Could Dominate FTO’s First Year as a WCA Event

The 10-year-old Chinese cuber has pushed his FTO average of 5 to 9.24, roughly two seconds ahead of the next-fastest known mark, months before the event becomes official.

When Skewb became an official WCA event in 2014, nine different people held the world record average during its first year. When Face Turning Octahedron becomes official in 2027, I think its first year could look very different. One cuber currently stands far ahead of the field: Ruichen Wan (万瑞晨).

He is an 10-year-old from Nantong, Jiangsu in China who has been destroying the unofficial records for FTO ao5 and even single. He started doing FTO late April 2025, under the coaching of another Chinese cuber known as Larch.

Larch and Ruichen met when last year, while riding a train. Ruichen met another cuber who was friends with Larch, and that’s how Larch began coaching Ruichen. Larch (Zhihai Liu (刘之海)) began doing FTO in 2022, but stopped due to a lack of good hardware until 2023 when Kang Chen developed his version of the RexTO, a FTO made from 3D printed extensions on a mass produced Super Ivy cube. Kang Chen is a very good FTOer as well, breaking FTO XAsR several times, and Larch told me he would not be doing FTO if it was not for Kang Chen, who has been very influential in the Chinese FTO scene.

Larch was able to coach Ruichen to Larch’s own speed of around 18 seconds by August 2025. In addition to doing FTO, Ruichen is also fast at other puzzles, averaging around six seconds flat at home on 3x3 and having a 2.39 second WCA average in Pyraminx. Ruichen also does other unofficial events that are very popular in China, such as Mirror Blocks (averaging about 14) and Baby FTO (averaging about low 1).

Larch began posting screenshots of some of Ruichen’s FTO PBs to the FTO Discord server on August 1, posting a 9.85 average of 5, the first ever sub 10 ao5 (with a 7.76 single which is already faster than Nguyễn Duy Sơn’s recent 7.94 UWR single. Then on August 3 he posted a 9.76 average of 5, slightly improving his PB.

Instead of doing one large session, Ruichen resets the session after every average of 5. This puts him at a disadvantage, since each ao5 stands completely on its own. In a normal continuous session, averages can overlap, giving a solver additional chances to improve a strong ao5 with the next solve.

It also means he just isn’t in the running for ao12 or ao100 UWRs yet until he decides to do a large session. These results shocked the FTO community, and there was a mysterious aura to this as there are few videos of Ruichen online.

The few videos of Ruichen that do exist are downsolves, where a solver takes a scramble they have already attempted, figures out an optimized solution, and then practices that same scramble repeatedly to get the time as low as possible.

However, in this downsolve, where he also shows a reconstruction, Ruichen demonstrates very fluid turning. Linked here.

Just now Larch has shared with me (from August 12) an insane 9.24 ao5. What is also notable is that Ruichen is using the Diansheng Neo FTO rather than the more popular Dayan FTO, which many top solvers consider the stronger-performing puzzle. Ruichen is using the Diansheng Neo because of his small hand size, the Dayan FTO is about 60.5mm height (which even adults consider to be a bit too big) and the Diansheng Neo has a 56 mm height, which adult solvers find pretty small but is a great size for 10 year old Ruichen.

This is completely unprecedented, as Ruichen is now more than two seconds faster than the next-fastest known ao5, an 11.30 by Aedan Bryant. This is why I think Ruichen will probably get the FTO world record when the event becomes official on January 2, 2027, and could hold it for a while. Obviously, there is always the possibility of another new solver we don’t know about emerging, or an established solver like Nguyễn Duy Sơn (aka Hakuken) or Aedan Bryant catching up. But with Ruichen currently more than two seconds ahead of the competition, it will be very tough for anyone to close the gap.

Ruichen is set to compete in an unofficial FTO competition on August 22, with two rounds of FTO scheduled. The current XWRs, records from unofficial in-person competitions, are an 11.70 single and 14.21 average by Aedan Bryant earlier this year. It will be very interesting to see what Ruichen is able to do in a competition setting.