Bitfire, a wealth-management firm, on Wednesday said it had agreed to buy the investment team and trading systems of Avenir Group, ?Li's family office, for $1.6 million.
Cryptocurrency trading has been banned in mainland China ?since 2021, while Hong Kong is striving to become a virtual asset hub.
After ?selling a controlling stake in Huobi for about $1 billion to crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun in 2022, Li shifted his focus to his family office.
With the acquisition, Bitfire plans to raise external ?money to provide regulated bitcoin-denominated asset management services, called the "Alpha BTC" strategy, said ?Livio Weng, CEO of Bitfire, in an interview.
Weng said the strategy would seek to attract investment ?equivalent ?to more than 10,000 bitcoins - worth around $760 million - within a year.
"Market demand for such products is huge," Weng said, as a growing number of local firms are holding bitcoin, though they lack ways to make gains from the digital currency.
At least 40 ?Hong Kong-listed ?companies have bitcoin holdings, according to Bitfire estimates.
Bitcoin was last trading at around $76,000, rebounding from a weak first quarter amid heavy volatility.
Since 2024, Avenir has become Asia's largest ?bitcoin ?ETF investor. The firm held 18.3 million shares ?of BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust with a valuation of $908 million as of the end of 2025, according ?to its regulatory filing.
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