Billionaire Li Lin Shifts Crypto Operations to Public Markets via Bitfire Acquisition

Chinese crypto billionaire Li Lin is set to transition his private trading operations into the public eye through a strategic acquisition involving Bitfire, a Hong Kong-listed wealth management firm where he serves as the largest shareholder. Bitfire announced on Wednesday that it will pay $1.6 million to acquire a sophisticated trading system and a specialized investment team from Avenir Group, Li’s personal family office. While technical in nature, the deal serves as a significant consolidation move, effectively folding Li’s private crypto expertise into a publicly traded vehicle to better capture institutional capital.

The maneuver comes as Hong Kong aggressively pivots to become a premiere regulated hub for digital assets, contrasting sharply with the 2021 trading ban maintained in mainland China. This regulatory evolution has already attracted major financial institutions, with the city recently granting stablecoin licenses to industry giants HSBC and Standard Chartered. By absorbing Avenir’s technical capabilities, Bitfire intends to capitalize on this maturing environment by launching “Alpha BTC,” an ambitious bitcoin-centric strategy aiming to manage over 10,000 bitcoins—valued at approximately $760 million—within its first year of operation.

The new investment strategy will focus on generating high-tier returns through complex derivatives trading, including bitcoin-linked options and regulated exchange-traded products. Avenir Group already enters this transition with a formidable footprint in the traditional crypto-finance space; regulatory filings from the end of 2025 revealed that the family office held 18.3 million shares of BlackRock’s IBIT Bitcoin ETF, a position valued at roughly $908 million.

This transition marks a new chapter for Li Lin, who originally rose to prominence as the founder of Huobi, once one of the world’s most dominant cryptocurrency exchanges. After building Huobi into a global powerhouse, Li exited the platform—now known as HTX—in 2022 by selling a controlling stake to Justin Sun for approximately $1 billion. Since that sale, Li has operated primarily through Avenir, and this latest move signals a pivot back toward large-scale, public-facing financial services under the evolving Hong Kong regulatory framework.