Revealing Li Lin's "Family Office": How to Invest the Remaining Half of the 1 Billion Dollars

Author: Family Office New Insights

In April 2026, a Hong Kong stock announcement from New Fire Group brought Huobi founder Li Lin back into the market spotlight.

New Fire Group plans to acquire the AvenirX institutional investment trading system from Avenir Investment Management Limited for approximately $1.5775 million. According to the announcement, since the seller is ultimately controlled by Li Lin, who also serves as the chairman and non-executive director of New Fire Group, this transaction constitutes a related party transaction.

This is not an ordinary software asset acquisition. Li Lin is integrating the investment trading capabilities accumulated within Avenir into the platform of a publicly listed company in Hong Kong.

From Huobi to Avenir, and then to New Fire Group, Li Lin's post-Huobi era is not a simple exit but a reconstruction of capital organization.

From Exchange Founder to Avenir Group

Li Lin's wealth originated from Huobi. As a first-generation entrepreneur in China's cryptocurrency industry, Huobi was one of the most important cryptocurrency trading platforms globally at its peak. Subsequently, with changes in the industry environment and regulatory policies, Li Lin sold his controlling stake in Huobi around 2022 for approximately $1 billion.

Avenir Group emerged in this context.

Its official website describes it as an investment group "originating from Li Lin's family office," positioned for strategic integration of traditional finance and digital assets, with investment directions covering digital assets, trading and financial service platforms, PayFi infrastructure, and RRWA.

More accurately, Avenir is not a traditional family office focused solely on wealth preservation and asset diversification, but an institutional investment management platform evolved from family capital: it has the funding background of a family office, as well as the trading capabilities of an asset management company and the expansion ambitions of a financial technology platform.

Avenir's Core Asset: Bitcoin ETF

To understand Avenir, one must first look at its clearest allocation—Bitcoin ETF. Avenir does not fully express its digital asset exposure through on-chain wallets or exchange accounts but holds a significant amount of U.S.-listed Bitcoin ETFs, particularly BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT).

The Blackrock iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) sign at the Nasdaq market center in New York.

According to the 13F filing submitted by Avenir Tech Ltd to the U.S. SEC, it held approximately 11.29 million shares of IBIT by the end of 2024, with a reported market value of about $599 million; by the end of the third quarter of 2025, it increased to approximately 18.3 million shares, with a market value of about $1.189 billion; by the end of 2025, it was approximately 18.29 million shares, with the market value dropping back to about $908 million (mainly due to price fluctuations rather than significant reductions in holdings). Avenir has stated that it has maintained the status of the largest Bitcoin ETF holder in Asia since the second quarter of 2024.

For a founder of an exchange like Li Lin, directly holding Bitcoin is not difficult. However, Avenir's choice to allocate heavily to ETFs indicates that it values not just the rise in coin prices but the long-term trend of digital assets entering the traditional financial system. Bitcoin ETFs convert on-chain assets into custodial, auditable, and disclosable securitized products, making it easier for Bitcoin to enter brokerage accounts, fund reports, and family office asset allocation tables.

It is important to note that the 13F filing only reflects the U.S.-listed securities held by the reporting entity within the Avenir system and does not equate to the total asset scale of Avenir. The IBIT holdings are an important window for observing Avenir's investment direction but cannot be simply equated to total AUM.

From Buying Coins to Building Trading Capabilities

If Avenir only heavily invested in IBIT, it would merely be a family capital platform betting on Bitcoin ETFs. However, Avenir's more critical move is to build trading, quantitative, and yield enhancement capabilities around its digital asset core.

In 2024, Avenir Crypto launched a $500 million collaborative program to provide funding support to outstanding global quantitative trading teams. This indicates that Avenir is not satisfied with merely obtaining Bitcoin Beta but hopes to gain additional returns through quantitative strategies and derivatives trading.

According to the announcement from New Fire Group, AvenirX is an institutional-level investment trading operating system composed of approximately 42 functional modules, covering research and investment, strategy portfolio management, order management, trade execution, risk control, and performance analysis.

Its execution layer supports algorithms such as TWAP, VWAP, and Iceberg, while the risk control layer covers pre-trade approval, 24/7 real-time monitoring, and post-trade review, spanning across strategy, account, portfolio, and system levels.

The value of this system lies not in it being just a software tool but in its ability to transform Avenir's internal trading experience, risk control rules, and research processes into deployable, auditable, and reviewable system assets.

The announcement stated that AvenirX has undergone market cycle testing in a real fund environment from 2024 to 2026, during which no significant risk events occurred.

From Investment Pathways to Asset Management Platform

From publicly available information, Avenir's investment layout is not a indiscriminate net-casting but unfolds around the institutionalization of digital assets.

The first layer is Bitcoin ETFs. Avenir establishes a core position through tools like IBIT, gaining compliant, transparent, and auditable exposure to digital assets.

The second layer is trading and quantitative capabilities. Avenir Crypto previously launched a $500 million quantitative cooperation plan to support external quantitative teams. The AvenirX system further strengthens internal trading, risk control, and yield enhancement capabilities. This indicates that Avenir aims to enhance returns through quantitative strategies, derivatives trading, and risk control systems on top of its core holdings.

The third layer is trading infrastructure and financial service platforms.

In 2026, Avenir announced a strategic investment and partnership with CoinRoutes. CoinRoutes is a provider of algorithmic execution and smart order routing technology for institutional digital asset trading, covering over 60 mainstream exchanges and liquidity providers, and supporting over 3,600 spot and derivatives trading pairs.

Avenir also led a $20 million seed round investment in Inference Research. The latter is positioned as an AI-native quantitative trading platform, with a core focus not just on "investing in AI" but on embedding AI capabilities at the intersection of digital assets and traditional finance for quantitative trading, asset pricing, and liquidity provision.

Additionally, Avenir participated in a strategic investment in Nasdaq-listed Metalpha. Metalpha primarily provides blockchain and trading technology solutions, cryptocurrency derivatives design, and institutional asset management services. In October 2025, Metalpha announced it received a combined strategic investment of about $12 million from Gortune and Avenir to expand blockchain trading services and digital asset technology layout. These investments indicate that Avenir is not engaging in decentralized financial investments but is filling capability gaps around the institutionalization of digital assets. IBIT addresses compliance exposure issues, the quantitative plan addresses strategy supply issues, CoinRoutes supplements trading execution and liquidity routing, Inference Research enhances AI quantitative capabilities, and Metalpha connects digital asset management with institutional service scenarios.

New Fire Group (Hong Kong stock 1611) is the key vehicle for releasing these capabilities to the external market. Li Lin serves as the chairman and non-executive director. The transfer of the AvenirX system to New Fire Group means that Li Lin is integrating Avenir's internal research, trading, and risk control capabilities into a publicly listed company platform.

The Alpha BTC strategy that New Fire Group plans to launch is a product manifestation of this pathway—using Bitcoin or IBIT ETF as the underlying asset to generate returns through derivatives trading such as options, targeting clients including crypto-native investors, local enterprises in Hong Kong, and institutional funds, with the goal of attracting over 10,000 Bitcoin equivalent funds within a year. However, this is part of the management's externally released business plan and still needs to be validated by subsequent formal implementation.

From an organizational perspective, this pathway is not solely accomplished by Li Lin.

Li Lin acts more as the source of capital and strategic judgment, while Avenir is responsible for solidifying Bitcoin ETF allocations, quantitative trading, risk control systems, and trading infrastructure capabilities. Professional teams such as Jason Lan and Jacob Zhong undertake specific executions in digital asset strategies, quantitative cooperation, and ecological investments, while New Fire Group CEO Weng Xiaoqi is responsible for productization and commercialization at the publicly listed company level.

In other words, what makes Avenir truly special is not just what Li Lin has invested in, but how it is connecting personal industry judgment, internal trading capabilities, and external asset management products.

Zhao Changpeng vs. Li Lin: Two Paths of New Wealth in Crypto

Zhao Changpeng and Li Lin are both representatives of the first generation of entrepreneurial wealth in the crypto industry. After stepping back from frontline exchange operations, both began to reorganize their capital, but their paths are entirely different.

Firstly, Zhao Changpeng's post-Binance era resembles an extension of industrial capital. Through YZi Labs, he continues to embed himself in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, extending from the crypto industry into AI, robotics, and biotechnology. The core capability of YZi Labs is not just funding but also industrial reputation, founder networks, and global influence. It resembles a VC and incubation platform with a family office background, focusing on where the next technological platform will emerge.

In contrast, Li Lin's post-Huobi era resembles a transformation in asset management. Avenir has not expanded along the path of multi-track technology investment but has built digital asset management infrastructure around Bitcoin ETFs, quantitative trading, trading systems, and publicly listed companies. Avenir's choice of ETFs is essentially to integrate digital assets into the traditional financial system.

Secondly, from an organizational form perspective, YZi Labs emphasizes "people" and "projects," relying on founder networks, Binance ecosystem resources, and long-term capital to connect with the next generation of entrepreneurs. In YZi Labs, Ella Zhang acts more like a typical VC operator, responsible for upgrading the investment system from the Binance Labs era into a cross-domain capital platform.

Avenir, on the other hand, emphasizes "systems" and "products." Its core is not a star investor but a combination of "system—strategy—product—publicly listed platform."

In summary, from the perspective of Family Office New Insights, the keyword for Zhao Changpeng is "industrial betting," while Li Lin's keyword is "financialization." The former extends influence into the entrepreneur network, while the latter solidifies capabilities into trading systems and product structures.

Implications for the Family Office Industry

Family Office New Insights believes that Avenir is worth the attention of the family office industry not because it has proven its success, but because it provides a different sample compared to traditional family offices.

Traditional family offices often revolve around asset preservation and inheritance, but the cases of crypto founders demonstrate that new wealth from high-volatility industries may not naturally lead to conservative allocations.

Family offices do not necessarily serve only as tools for risk contraction; they can also be capital platforms for founders to continue participating in industrial cycles. The core assets of a family office may not only be money but also industrial insights, trading systems, and team capabilities. The forms of family offices will also become increasingly diversified, with traditional families focusing more on governance and inheritance, while tech and crypto founders may place greater emphasis on systems, products, and platform capabilities.

However, Avenir's path cannot simply be written off as a successful transformation.

Whether AvenirX can truly bring stable AUM growth after transitioning to a publicly listed company will depend on product issuance, client acceptance, and real-world performance. Bitcoin-based asset management strategies like Alpha BTC inherently remain exposed to the risks of high-volatility assets and derivatives trading. More importantly, Avenir's transition from a family capital platform to an external asset management platform means facing higher compliance, disclosure, and reputation management requirements.

From Huobi to Avenir, and then to New Fire Group, the real question raised by this case is whether, when a generation of entrepreneurial wealth comes from a highly volatile industry, family offices should retreat into defense or transform their existing industrial capabilities into the next phase of capital systems.

Li Lin's answer is the latter.

("Family Office New Insights" reminds: The content and views are for reference only and do not constitute any investment advice.)