Li Lin Moves Avenir Group Trading Desk to Bitfire for Hong Kong Bitcoin Push

Li Lin, the Chinese crypto tycoon who once built Huobi into a global exchange giant, is parking his Bitcoin asset management ambitions inside a listed Hong Kong shell. On Wednesday, April 22, 2026, Bitfire Group, the Hong Kong-listed wealth manager where Li is the biggest shareholder, confirmed it has agreed to buy the investment team and trading systems of Avenir Group, Li's family office, for $1.6 million. The move routes Avenir's trading muscle into a public company and frees Bitfire to raise outside capital for a new bitcoin-denominated product line.

The $1.6 Million Deal That Moves a Whole Trading Desk

The headline number is small. The implication is not. $1.6 million buys Bitfire a full trading stack plus the people who know how to run it, lifted straight out of Avenir Group, the family office Li Lin set up after cashing out of Huobi. Avenir is not a random single-family shop. Since 2024 it has quietly become Asia's largest bitcoin ETF investor, and its regulatory filings paint the picture: 18.3 million shares of BlackRock's IBIT worth $908 million as of the end of 2025.

That is the team and the book Bitfire is absorbing. Li, originally from Hunan province, built Huobi (now rebranded HTX) before Beijing's 2021 crackdown tore through the mainland crypto industry. In 2022, he sold his controlling stake to Justin Sun for roughly $1 billion and walked. Avenir was the vehicle for what came next. Now that vehicle is feeding its engine into a Hong Kong listed company, where external investors can actually buy in.

Market demand for such products is huge.

Why Is Li Lin Using a Listed Vehicle Instead of Avenir Directly?

Answer first: because a family office cannot sell a regulated product to outside money, and a Hong Kong listed wealth manager can. By pushing the trading team into Bitfire Group, ticker 1611.HK, Li gets a regulated wrapper, public-market optics, and a fundraising channel Avenir simply does not have on its own.

The timing lines up with Hong Kong's wider push to become a virtual asset hub. Mainland China still bans cryptocurrency trading, a line that has held since 2021. Hong Kong went the other way, courting exchanges, ETF issuers, and now the kind of structured bitcoin products that can sit inside a local brokerage account. Li is not inventing that demand. He is positioning to collect it.

Inside the Alpha BTC Strategy

Bitfire CEO Livio Weng laid out the plan in an interview. The product is called Alpha BTC. It is bitcoin-denominated. That matters, because investors measure returns in BTC rather than fiat, a pitch aimed squarely at holders who already believe in the asset and want yield on top of it. Weng said the target is attracting inflows equivalent to more than 10,000 bitcoins within a year, roughly $760 million at the current spot price of about $76,000.

How does Alpha BTC actually make money? Derivatives. Options, specifically, written against bitcoin or against BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust as the underlying. That is a structured-product playbook familiar to any equity desk, rewired for a crypto collateral pool. Call it a covered-call fund for the bitcoin generation if you want a shorthand.

• Product name: Alpha BTC
• Target AUM: 10,000+ BTC within 12 months (roughly $760 million)
• Return basis: bitcoin-denominated, not USD
• Underlying assets: spot bitcoin and IBIT ETF
• Strategy type: derivatives, primarily options

Who Actually Buys This Product?

Two buckets, according to Weng. Crypto-native investors who sit on bitcoin and currently have nothing productive to do with it. And Hong Kong-based firms, many of which have added BTC to their balance sheets in the past two years without any framework for earning on those positions. Bitfire estimates at least 40 Hong Kong-listed companies now hold bitcoin. That is a standing customer list.

The second bucket is the more interesting one. Corporate treasuries tend not to run option-writing programs on their own. Outsourcing that to a licensed local wealth manager, under a strategy that pays out in the same asset they already own, solves a problem that most CFOs do not even know how to frame internally. If even a fraction of those 40 companies write a check, Weng's 10,000 BTC target is plausible.

What the Market Backdrop Says

Bitcoin was last trading around $76,000, rebounding from a weak first quarter marked by heavy volatility. That is the price environment Alpha BTC launches into, and it matters in two directions. Lower spot prices mean cheaper entry for new capital. Higher realized volatility means richer option premiums, which is exactly what a derivatives-based strategy wants to sell.

The deeper read is about where Chinese crypto capital goes now that the mainland door is shut. Li Lin is a case study in what that looks like. The talent, the systems, and the bitcoin book all end up in Hong Kong, inside a listed entity, marketed to institutions rather than retail. That is the pattern, and Bitfire is one of the cleaner executions of it so far.

The Cynical Read

Strip the press release language away and this is a founder-led reverse merger in all but name. Li Lin already controls Bitfire as its largest shareholder. He is now selling his own family office's most valuable operating asset into that listed company for a round number that will not strain either party. The external capital raise that follows is where the real upside lives, both for Bitfire the stock and for Li the shareholder.

None of that is necessarily bad for investors. Structured bitcoin products with real derivatives teams behind them are rare in Asia, and Avenir's track record as the region's largest IBIT holder is hard to fake. But the governance question is worth flagging. When the CEO's boss, the product's architect, and the family office being acquired are all the same person, the only real check on pricing and execution is market scrutiny. That scrutiny starts now.