Huobi founder Li Lin taps Bitfire to recover $760M in disputed Bitcoin

Bitfire is where Li Lin is placing his next crypto bet in Hong Kong. Li is taking the trading team and trading setup from Avenir Group, his family office, and putting them into Bitfire Group, the Hong Kong-listed company where he is the biggest shareholder.

Bitfire, which works in wealth management, said on Wednesday that it 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 build itself into a virtual asset center. 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 into Hong Kong to raise outside Bitcoin money

With the Avenir deal in place, Bitfire wants to raise outside capital for a regulated bitcoin-denominated asset management product called Alpha BTC.

Livio Weng, chief executive of Bitfire, said the company wants to attract investment equal to more than 10,000 Bitcoins within a year. At the value cited in the source material, that is about $760 million.

Livio said, “Market demand for such products is huge,” as more local companies hold Bitcoin but still do not have an easy way to earn returns from it.

He said the Alpha BTC strategy plans to generate profit through derivatives trading, including options, using either bitcoin or the IBIT ETF as the underlying asset. The target clients are both crypto-native investors and Hong Kong-based companies.

That target list matters because Bitfire estimates that at least 40 Hong Kong-listed companies already hold bitcoin.

So the company is going after a market where companies already have crypto on their books and may now want a regulated way to try to earn more from those holdings.

Hong Kong builds crypto rules while US lawmakers stay stuck over stablecoin and market bills

Meanwhile, at one of the city’s biggest Web3 events, officials and lawmakers talked openly about taking Hong Kong’s crypto push beyond the local market.

Eric Yip Chee-hang, executive director of intermediaries at the Securities and Futures Commission, said, “We can be a little bit more aspirational now that we have a strong hold locally. We should also expand our influence by [increasing] exposure internationally.”

Eric added that Hong Kong had been “in the spotlight” at international conferences because it had “achieved so much.”

Earlier this month, the city gave out its first two licenses for stablecoin issuers. It is also pushing ahead with rules for crypto dealers and custodians.

Duncan Chiu Tat-kun, a member of the Legislative Council for the Technology and Innovation constituency, said on Monday that there had been “a lot of advancement” in the United States. He said Hong Kong was paying close attention to US bills including the Genius Act, which deals with stablecoins, and the Clarity Act, which is meant to set rules for crypto market structure.

But Duncan also said the Clarity Act has stalled because the Senate is still dealing with a fight over stablecoin yield between banks and crypto companies. He said Hong Kong needs to keep watching what happens next in Washington.

If the bill does not pass this month, he said it could slide to the end of 2027. He added that such a delay would slow a lot of the legislative work in the US, especially with uncertainty around the midterm elections in November.

Duncan said, “I think they’ve written a very good bill, but the political situation will not give clarity [for] some time to the development of the market.”

He then pointed to Hong Kong’s “steady progressive build-up” in digital asset regulation compared with the changing ground in the US before Donald Trump took office in January 2025 and after the Biden administration had taken a hard line against crypto companies.

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