The Hong Kong-listed company hopes to attract more than 10,000 BTC into its regulated asset management strategy, a target worth around $760 million at current prices.
While the numbers are impressive in themselves, it is the structure of the strategy that reveals the true scope of this plan. Hong Kong is poised to become a place where large pools of Bitcoin capital can exist within a familiar financial system under local rules, without forcing Asian investors to rely on U.S. ETFs or offshore exchanges for every serious capital allocation.
HTX (formerly Huobi) founder Li Lin plans to move his trading systems and investment team from his family’s firm Avenir Group to Hong Kong-listed Bitfire Group. Bitfire is preparing a regulated Bitcoin-denominated strategy called AlphaBTC, and CEO Livio Wen said the company aims to attract more than 10,000 BTC from investors.
The strategy is expected to use derivatives tied to Bitcoin or BlackRock’s IBIT. Avenir has become one of Asia’s largest holders of US Bitcoin ETF exposure through its $908 million IBIT position.
As evidenced by the size of this position, Asian capital already owns a significant amount of Bitcoin through Wall Street. Some of it is held in US ETFs, some on offshore platforms, and some is held by public companies, family offices, and crypto-native investors who know the assets well but need a structure that banks, auditors, boards of directors, and regulators can understand.
Bitfire’s pitch is aimed at that gap, bringing capital closer to home and within Hong Kong’s regulated market, shifting Bitcoin exposure from backdoor trading to closer to local financial infrastructure.
Hong Kong not only wants assets but also rappers
The easiest way to understand the importance of this strategy is to separate Bitcoin from its surrounding wrapper.
Bitcoin itself is traded all over the world. Everyone can see the same prices, send the same assets and settle on the same network. However, large investors are rarely directly involved in this. Family offices, listed companies, fund managers or wealthy individuals typically require custody, enforcement, risk management, audited statements, legal liability, and an involved regulator with clear guidelines.
That’s why spot Bitcoin ETFs have become such a powerful product in the US. They allow investors to purchase Bitcoin exposure through their brokerage accounts using the familiar stock market rails, with a large asset manager and a regulated custodian in between.
crypto slate covers how Hong Kong-related capital is already using that route, including Roroll’s previous disclosure of a $436 million IBIT position. The US ETF wrapper has solved one of the problems of global capital by making it easier to own Bitcoin through traditional finance. However, the US market accounted for most of that access.
The Hong Kong version is about local control of the wrapper. Hong Kong’s regulated vehicles will be able to interact with Asian investors in their respective time zones, subject to local rules, through the markets they already use for equities, structured products, wealth management and family office capital. For professional investors in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and even mainland China, this affects which lawyers review products, which banks touch the funds, which courts have jurisdiction, and which government agencies regulate the products.
Hong Kong has spent the past two years preparing for that role.
The Securities and Futures Commission has sought to improve market liquidity by licensing virtual asset trading platforms, expanding the scope for regulated products and allowing licensed platforms to connect to the global order book under new rules. In November, the SFC announced it would allow locally licensed platforms to share global order books with overseas affiliates, a substantial concession aimed at making Hong Kong’s crypto market less isolated and more useful to serious capital.
The city is also focusing on stablecoins. Hong Kong passed the Stablecoin Bill in May 2025, creating a licensing framework for fiat reference issuers, and the system was launched in August of the same year. Standard Chartered, Animoca and HKT were among the early names active in the regulated Hong Kong dollar stablecoin race. Stablecoins are trending in the same direction as these Bitcoin derivatives, albeit in separate corners of the market. Hong Kong wants to operate under a rulebook controlled by trading venues, stablecoin issuers, asset managers and listed companies.
This makes Alpha BTC more important than a standard product launch. This is the largest part of an even larger effort to transform cryptocurrencies from offshore activities to regulated capital formation.
Bitcoin is global, but access to Bitcoin is becoming local
While Bitcoin’s original promise was borderless money, the largest pool of capital flowing into Bitcoin now exists like a border around exposure. They want regulators, listing venues, custody arrangements, legal claims, and an administrator they can call if something goes wrong.
This creates a rather tricky split. Assets can be moved globally in minutes, but the institutional structures around them move according to local laws, local politics, and local market customs.
From there, geographic competition begins.
The US has a monopoly on regulated access to Bitcoin through ETFs, and BlackRock’s IBIT serves as a symbol of Wall Street’s trade controls. Offshore exchanges still dominate much of the retail and derivatives activity, especially for users seeking speed, leverage, and looser access.
Hong Kong is now trying to attract a third lane, or Asian capital that wants regulated Bitcoin exposure without relying on U.S. market infrastructure.
But why is this happening now? Hong Kong is vying for its place as a financial center as Singapore, Dubai, the US and Europe build their own digital asset regimes.
Cryptocurrency regulations in mainland China remain strict, making Hong Kong’s role a delicate but very useful one. This could serve as a controlled offshore venue for financial experiments that the Chinese government would never allow in earnest. Hong Kong has already launched a spot crypto ETF in 2024, expanded its exchange license, pursued stablecoin rules and is exploring a wider range of crypto assets products as part of a deliberate hub strategy.
Of course, this has its limits. The $760 million target is big enough to get attention, but it’s tiny compared to the U.S. ETF complex. Derivatives-based strategies carry their own risks, especially when returns depend on options, basis trading, volatility, and market timing. Hong Kong also needs to manage political tensions between its crypto ambitions and Beijing’s discomfort with the rapid expansion of offshore digital assets. We saw this situation unfold last year when Chinese regulators reportedly asked some brokerages to suspend tokenization activities of real assets in Hong Kong.
Still, the direction Hong Kong is heading in is fairly clear. Bitcoin adoption is moving to a stage where the main question is no longer whether financial institutions can buy the asset, but what system they should use to do so.
As more Asian capital is held through Hong Kong’s regulatory structures, capital flows could begin to respond to Hong Kong policy decisions, Asian asset management cycles, regional liquidity, and local investor behavior. Price discovery may become less US-centric over time, especially if Hong Kong products grow beyond passive exposure into lending, derivatives, structured income and treasury management.
Although Bitcoin may be traded as one global asset, access to Bitcoin is divided into country and regional wrappers. A US investor buying IBIT, a Hong Kong family office allocating to AlphaBTC, and an offshore trader using PERP may all be expressing their views on Bitcoin, but they all do it through different financial systems. These systems determine who can enter, how quickly money can leave, and what happens if regulators get nervous.
This is also why Hong Kong’s stablecoin promotion is so important. crypto slate reports on Asia’s attempts to build a counterweight to the dollar-led crypto rail, but its regulatory map
showed how, in 2025, cryptocurrency law has transformed from a patchwork of warnings to a working set of national regimes.
Bitcoin capital pools, stablecoin licenses, licensed exchanges, and listed asset management companies all do different things. When you put them together, it starts to look like a local market structure.
Hong Kong’s bet is that there is enough demand for Bitcoin in Asia to support these structures locally. The next stage of Bitcoin adoption will most likely be shaped by the financial system that buyers choose. If Hong Kong succeeds, Asia will begin to build its own capital pool around Bitcoin, with its own rules, its own flows, and its own claims to the market.
(Tag Translation) Bitcoin
