Bitfire is where Li Lin is making his next bet on cryptocurrencies in Hong Kong. Lee takes the trading team and trading setups from Avenir Group, his family office, and puts them into Bitfire Group, the Hong Kong-listed company where he is the largest shareholder.
Wealth management company Bitfire said Wednesday it has agreed to buy Avenir’s investment team and trading systems for $1.6 million.
Li first made his name through Huobi, the exchange now called HTX. Mainland China has banned cryptocurrency trading since 2021, but Hong Kong is trying to turn itself into a virtual asset hub. Li sold a controlling stake in Huobi for about $1 billion to Justin Sun in 2022. After that, he turned his attention to Avenir.
Bitfire brings Li’s trading team to Hong Kong to raise Bitcoin funds from abroad
With the implementation of the Avenir deal, Bitfire wants to raise external capital for a regulated bitcoin-denominated asset management product called Alpha BTC.
Bitfire CEO Liviu Wong said the company wants to attract investments equivalent to more than 10,000 bitcoins within one year. The value mentioned in the source material is approximately $760 million.
“The market demand for such products is huge,” with the number of local companies increasing, Livio said Bitcoin But you still have no easy way to earn returns from it.
He said the Alpha BTC strategy plans to make profits by trading derivatives, including options, using either Bitcoin or an IBIT ETF as the underlying asset. Target clients are local cryptocurrency investors and Hong Kong-based companies.
This targeted list is important because Bitfire estimates that at least 40 Hong Kong-listed companies already own Bitcoin.
So the company is pursuing a market where companies already have cryptocurrencies on their books and may now want a regulated way to try to earn more from those holdings.
Hong Kong sets rules for cryptocurrencies while US lawmakers remain stuck on stablecoins and market bills
Meanwhile, at one of the city’s largest Web3 events, officials and lawmakers spoke out about pushing cryptocurrencies in Hong Kong beyond the local market.
“We can be a bit more ambitious now that we have strong control domestically,” said Eric Yip Chee Hang, executive director of brokers at the Securities and Futures Commission. “We should also expand our influence by (increasing) exposure internationally.”
Eric added that Hong Kong was “in the spotlight” at international conferences because it had “achieved a lot.”
Earlier this month, the city granted the first two licenses to stablecoin issuers. It is also moving forward with rules for cryptocurrency traders and custodians.
Duncan Chiu Tat Koon, Member of the Legislative Council of the Department of Technology and Innovation, He said On Monday, he said there had been “a lot of progress” in the United States. He said Hong Kong is paying close attention to US draft laws including the Genius Act, which deals with stablecoins, and the Clarity Act, which aims to set rules for the structure of the cryptocurrency market.
But Duncan also said that the Clarity Act has stalled because the Senate is still dealing with a battle over stablecoin returns between banks and cryptocurrency companies. He said Hong Kong needs to continue to monitor what happens next in Washington.
He said that if the bill does not pass this month, it could fall to the end of 2027. He added that such a delay would slow down a lot of legislative work in the United States, especially with uncertainty about the midterm elections in November.
“I think they wrote a very good bill, but the political situation is not going to clear up some time for the market to develop,” Duncan said.
He then pointed to Hong Kong’s “steady, gradual buildup” in digital asset regulation compared to the changing ground in the United States before Donald Trump took office in January 2025 and after the Biden administration took a hard line against cryptocurrency companies.
