🇨🇳 Xuanyi Geng

Geng's World Cube Association identifier, 2023GENG02, dates his competitive debut to 2023. By the spring of 2025 he was already at the front of the world's fastest event. His 3.05-second solve at Shenyang Spring 2025 took the record from Yiheng Wang, whose 3.08 had been set only weeks earlier in February 2025 — an interval that captures how compressed the top of the sport had become.

The solve itself was the third of five in the round. His times were 4.24, 4.69, 3.05, 4.57 and 4.46, an average of 4.42 that won the round outright. That spread is characteristic of the event: a world-record single is partly a matter of drawing a scramble that yields to a short solution, and partly of being fast enough to convert it when it appears.

What separates Geng from a one-scramble record holder is what he did next, in the harder discipline. A world-record average requires five consecutive solves, with the fastest and slowest discarded — no lucky scramble can carry it. On 11 January 2026 at Beijing Winter 2026 he posted solves of 5.09, 3.96, 3.71, 3.84 and 3.37 for a 3.84-second average, the first sub-3.90 average in history.

On 26 April 2026, at Deqing Small & Special 2026 in Huzhou, Zhejiang, he lowered his own record to 3.71 seconds, and in the same round produced a 2.80-second single that stands as an Asian record.

His single-solve world record did not last: on 8 February 2026, the Polish nine-year-old Teodor Zajder solved a cube in 2.76 seconds at a competition in Gdańsk, becoming the first person to break three seconds. The two results, ten months apart, are the reason the modern sub-3-second era has a date attached to it at all.

Modern speedcubing is a solved problem in the mathematical sense and an unsolved one in the physical sense. Every scramble can be returned to a solved state in at most twenty moves, a result proved by computer search in 2010, and the methods top competitors use are public, documented and taught freely. What separates the fastest solvers is execution: recognising a case in the fifteen-second inspection window, and turning at speeds where the limiting factor is the hardware in the hand and the nervous system driving it.

That is why the record book has been rewritten by children. Reaction time and pattern recognition are at their sharpest in the early teens, magnetised cubes have removed most of the mechanical penalty for turning fast, and the practice volumes involved — thousands of solves a month — are easier to sustain at an age with fewer competing obligations. The World Cube Association's public database, which logs every official solve, makes the resulting progression unusually easy to audit.

The World Cube Association's public database records the shape of his career in numbers: 81 competitions, 1,374 recorded solves, three world records, one continental record and 76 medals — 39 gold, 32 silver and 5 bronze. As of 1 September 2026 his personal bests stand at 2.80 seconds single and 3.67 seconds average.