From Avenir to UMX, Li Lin's return and new propositions
By Eric, Foresight News
In the summer of 2026, UMX, which was incubated by Li Lin's Avenir Group, began public testing, which also made outsiders once again set their sights on this group of Chinese entrepreneurs in the crypto industry.
Thirteen years have passed since Huobi was founded in 2013. At that time, Li Lin was standing in a market that had just taken shape. The problem he faced was very straightforward: how to make it easier for more people to trade Bitcoin. Thirteen years later, the crypto industry has moved from a relatively independent digital asset market to a new stage of continuous convergence with ETFs, stablecoins, RWA, and traditional securities.
Over the past few years, Li Lin's role has also changed. In 2023, he founded Avenir Group in Hong Kong, gradually shifting from a frontline entrepreneur to an investor and asset allocator, continuing to focus on digital assets, securities trading, and financial infrastructure.
Today, UMX has emerged as an “Avenir Group Incubator”, giving these seemingly scattered investment leads over the past few years a new perspective.
Problems also followed. In the years since Huobi founded Avenir Group, what exactly is Li Lin doing, and what is it that has made him stand back to the stage now?
From Beijing to Hong Kong, from athletes to referees
To understand this return, you must first go back to where you left.
In September 2013, Huobi went online. It was a crazy year when Bitcoin rushed from 800 yuan to 8,000 yuan. It was also a year on the eve of Mentougou's collapse and the industry grew reckless. A young man from Hengyang, graduated from the Tsinghua Automation Department, wrote code for Oracle, and had started a business twice. Using the “permanent exemption of processing fees,” he cut through the Bitcoin exchange market, which had experienced rough experiences at the time. Half a year after launch, Huobi's daily transaction volume exceeded 1.5 billion yuan. At its peak, it occupied more than half of the global Bitcoin exchange market. Zhenge Fund, Dai Zhikang, and Sequoia Capital followed one after another, and Li Lin became one of the most familiar faces of entrepreneurs in the Chinese crypto world.
Over the next decade, Huobi and Li Lin experienced a complete cycle of the crypto industry from early recklessness to global compliance competition. For an entrepreneur, this experience left behind not only how to become a trading platform, but also a complete set of perceptions about trading, liquidity, user needs, account systems, and risks.
However, running a platform and allocating a sum of money is not the same way to look at the market.
In 2023, Li Lin founded Avenir Group in Hong Kong. The name comes from French and means “better future”. From managing an exchange with your own hands to managing a multi-strategy family office, the roles have changed, and so has the way you look at the market. In the past, he was an athlete on the field, watching user growth, transaction volume, product lines, and liquidity, and was fighting closely with his opponents every minute and every second. Now he is sitting on the sidelines and working as a fund allocator, but what he sees is a different set of problems. Where are funds left idle, where are assets split, why can't accounts be exchanged, and why is risk difficult to be managed uniformly.
These issues are hard to see from an operator's perspective, because exchanges naturally only care about matters within their own market. From the perspective of the configurator, they are so dazzling that one cannot ignore them.
Avenir's actions over the past few years have vaguely outlined a main line. The list has been drawn up for a long time. It has taken a stake in UP Fintech, the parent company of Tiger Securities, as a core investor, participated in the US$300 million equity financing of the Hong Kong licensed platform OSL, invested in the institutional order routing company CoinRoutes and options derivatives infrastructure SignalPlus, led the AI native quantification platform Inference Research, and signed multiple assets with Tiger Securities and AMINA Bank on Consensus Hong Kong Infrastructure Cooperation Memorandum.
According to the 13F filing submitted to the SEC, Avenir ranked first among Asian Bitcoin ETF institutions for eight consecutive quarters, with BlackRock IBIT alone holding more than 18 million shares. In addition, Avenir launched a $500 million quantitative partnership program to provide capital and ecological support to mature quantitative trading teams, and also acquired the Japanese compliant trading platform BitTrade through the Xinhua Group. The investment reach of licensed platforms, brokerage services, transaction execution, quantitative capabilities, and stablecoin payments covers almost every aspect required to connect the two markets.
Looking at individual projects, these investments are scattered across different products and markets. Looking at it together, the direction is becoming increasingly clear: crypto assets are entering the traditional asset allocation system, traditional financial institutions are beginning to adopt digital assets and blockchain infrastructure, and investors' demand for cross-market allocation and transactions is surging.
Li Lin's layout has long been extended from investing in a single circuit to a connecting area between the two financial systems. In the spring of this year, Xinhuo Technology changed its name to Xinhuo Group, then acquired Avenir's software assets. The investment and trading capabilities that the family had accumulated over many years began to be systematically injected into an open platform for Hong Kong stocks. Looking at it this time, this clue is almost a groundwork that UMX laid down ahead of time.
The industry has changed
What made Li Lin re-examine the industry was not just book observations, but structural changes in the industry.
The past four years have also happened to be four years where crypto finance and traditional finance have moved from mutual evaluation to embedding each other. Bitcoin spot ETF was approved in the US, and for the first time, digital assets were officially incorporated into the traditional financial allocation framework. Stablecoins have gone from being a grey area deposit and withdrawal tool to a funding channel accepted by the legislation of major economies. RWA and stock tokenization have brought traditional assets such as treasury bonds and stocks into the crypto context. The boundaries between brokerage, escrow, clearing, market makers, and trading platforms are being redrawn.
Early crypto users only operated within digital assets; today some professional users already live in both markets at the same time. They look not only at on-chain liquidity, but also at the Federal Reserve interest rate, technology stock earnings, ETF capital flows, and the dollar cycle. Their question is no longer where they can buy certain assets, but whether these assets can be used within the same strategy and funding framework. The previous generation of trading platforms competed for entry, liquidity, and asset coverage; the next stage of competition is likely to shift to accounts, capital, and risk management.
These are not hotspots rotating, but signals. Together, they point to the fact that the era of self-contained crypto is coming to an end, and a new continent is rising at the intersection of the two markets.
However, there is still a shortage of a decent port in this new continent. The previous generation of trading platforms solved the problem of how digital assets were traded, and DEXs solved the problem of how on-chain assets circulate in open agreements, but until today, few people have seriously answered the third question. When a professional investor holds BTC, stablecoins, US stocks, ETFs, options, and yield products at the same time, can these assets be placed in the same account, the same funding framework, and the same risk control system?
Reality is fragmented. A user may hold a large number of stablecoins on the chain, lay US stocks and ETFs in a brokerage account, and also need options, financing, and margin to execute the strategy. There are more and more assets, but systems are becoming more and more fragmented. Money is moving back and forth between accounts, and every migration is draining efficiency and opportunity.
This is exactly the question UMX wanted to answer. It doesn't start from a trading portal like the previous generation platform, but rather starts from the asset structure of professional investors. When a person lives in two markets at the same time, how should the platform help him manage assets, schedule funds, execute strategies, and control risk.
Standing at the intersection of two markets
UMX is the full name of The Unified Market Exchange. What really matters in the name is not Exchange, but Unified Market.
UMX positions itself as a crypto-friendly securities platform for professional investors. The focus is not on securities, nor on cryptography, but on a combination of the two types of capabilities. Traditional brokerage firms understand account systems, financing instruments, equity arrangements, and compliance frameworks, while crypto platforms understand stablecoins, round-the-clock transactions, and high-frequency capital turnover. In the past, these two types of capabilities were divided into two worlds, but now new user structures are forcing them to grow together.
Over the past period, many crypto platforms have begun to provide products related to US stocks, stock tokens, synthetic assets, and CFDs, which provide convenient price exposure and are suitable for lightweight trading and short-term expression. However, for professional investors, US stocks have never been just a price entry point. They are concerned about whether the underlying assets are clear, whether the tools are complete, whether they can cover ETFs and options, and whether these capabilities can truly be linked to digital asset positions, financing, and margins. UMX emphasizes professional US stock trading. The intention is that stocks are not a subsidiary category of cryptographic platforms, but a key asset module in a unified market.
When it comes to the specific trading experience, the outline of this set of designs is more clear. According to the disclosure, a user has USDT and BTC lying in their crypto account. If they want to buy US stocks, they must first withdraw stablecoins, exchange them for fiat currency, wait for the bank to arrive, and then deposit money into the securities account. Every step is charged and time-consuming. In the UMX unified account, USDT can be exchanged for US dollars and transferred to a securities account with one click, instantly forming purchasing power. If you don't want to sell BTC, you can start a loan transfer. Use your position as collateral to borrow USD and transfer over, and you don't have to move a single coin for your crypto position. What was bought was not a CFD or tokenized exposure, but real US stocks with full shareholders' rights, 12 order types, 8 option combination strategies, split shares starting at $1, and pre- and post-market transactions.
What's even more interesting is the path of returning funds. Nvidia shares in hand can be converted into corresponding stock tokens and added to the unified margin pool at the applicable discount rate to support crypto derivatives and leveraged transactions. You don't have to give up your exposure to US stocks for a day, and the tokens can be transferred back to real stocks at any time. Even interest-bearing assets such as Cash Bao and Term Wealth Management can be used as a security deposit while continuing to accrue interest. In this account system, money is almost no longer idle.
There are no earth-shattering new inventions in this set of logic, but it points to a restructuring of asset relationships. Assets are not only held; they can also be dispatched. Revenue is not only generated statically; it can also be a service deposit. Stocks are not only allocated for a long time; they can also enter strategy execution along with digital assets. The real meaning of a unified market is not to pile up more assets on one platform, but to make money work more efficiently between the two markets.
So strictly speaking, UMX isn't a simple copy of the logic of previous generation trading platforms. Both CEX and DEX can't find a place for UMX on the extension line. It stands at the intersection of two markets, an intersection where no one has seriously operated in the past.
Thirteen years later, the problem is different
Li Lin was just over 30 years old when he founded Huobi in 2013. His eyes were staring at the bright gap in a rough market. He had a fast knife with no fees in his hands. He played a tough game, had a flexible style of play, and had a simple and straightforward goal to make a better Bitcoin trading site.
Thirteen years have passed, and that young man is already a confused year. After experiencing a complete industry cycle and moving from a frontline entrepreneur to the position of an investor and asset allocator, the way we look at the market has changed. Perhaps the biggest change is the problem itself. The previous generation of trading platforms faced “how can digital assets be better traded”. Today, as more and more professional investors hold BTC, stablecoins, US stocks, ETFs, options, and even various yield assets at the same time, the new question is: How can these assets be used in the same funding and risk framework?
From Avenir Group's investment landscape over the past few years to now incubating UMX, this clue is becoming increasingly clear.
Whether UMX can work depends on real users and market cycles to verify. It's too early to draw any conclusions. But at least this summer, the young man who once wore slippers to talk about decentralization in his garage coffee was once again at the beginning of the industry's narrative.
Just this time, the market has changed, and the problem is no longer the same.
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