From Avenir to UMX: Li Lin's Return and New Proposition

After 13 years, Li Lin once again stands at the starting point of industry narrative.

Written by: Eric, Foresight News

In the summer of 2026, UMX, incubated by Li Lin's Avenir Group, will begin public testing, drawing attention once more to this early Chinese entrepreneur in the crypto industry.

It has been thirteen years since Li Lin founded Huobi in 2013. At that time, he was in a nascent market, facing a very direct question: how to make it easier for more people to trade Bitcoin. Thirteen years later, the crypto industry has evolved from a relatively independent digital asset market to a new stage where it intersects with ETFs, stablecoins, RWAs, and traditional securities.

In recent years, Li Lin's role has also been changing. In 2023, he founded Avenir Group in Hong Kong, gradually transitioning from a frontline entrepreneur to an investor and asset allocator, continuously laying out strategies around digital assets, securities trading, and financial infrastructure.

Now, UMX appears under the banner of "incubated by Avenir Group," providing a new lens through which to observe the seemingly scattered investment clues from the past few years.

Questions arise. What has Li Lin been doing during these years after leaving Huobi to establish Avenir Group, and what has brought him back to the forefront at this moment?

From Beijing to Hong Kong, from athlete to referee

To understand this return, we must first revisit the departure.

In September 2013, Huobi went online. It was a crazy year when Bitcoin surged from 800 to 8,000 yuan, and also the eve of the collapse of Mentougou, a year marked by chaos in the industry. A young man from Hengyang, a graduate of Tsinghua's automation department, who had written code at Oracle and gone through two entrepreneurial ventures, sliced through the rough Bitcoin trading market with the knife of "permanently waived fees." Within six months of its launch, Huobi's daily trading volume exceeded 1.5 billion yuan, capturing more than half of the global Bitcoin trading market at its peak. ZhenFund, Dai Zhikang, and Sequoia Capital followed suit, making Li Lin one of the most familiar faces in the Chinese crypto world.

In the nearly ten years that followed, Huobi and Li Lin experienced a complete cycle of the crypto industry from early chaos to global compliance competition. For an entrepreneur, this experience left not just knowledge on how to run a trading platform, but a comprehensive understanding of trading, liquidity, user demand, account systems, and risk.

However, managing a platform and allocating capital involves different perspectives on the market.

In 2023, Li Lin founded Avenir Group in Hong Kong, a name derived from French, meaning "a better future." Transitioning from personally managing an exchange to overseeing a multi-strategy family office, his role has changed, and so has his perspective on the market. Previously, he was an athlete on the field, focused on user growth, trading volume, product lines, and liquidity, engaged in close combat with competitors every second. Now he sits on the sidelines as a capital allocator, facing a different set of questions: where is capital idling, where are assets being fragmented, why can't accounts communicate, and why is risk difficult to manage uniformly?

These issues are hard to see from an operator's perspective, as exchanges naturally only care about their internal matters. From an allocator's viewpoint, they are glaringly impossible to ignore.

Avenir's actions over the past few years sketch out a main line. The list is long: acquiring over 10% of the shares in UP Fintech, the parent company of Tiger Brokers, participating as a core investor in the $300 million equity financing of the licensed platform OSL in Hong Kong, investing in institutional-grade order routing company CoinRoutes and options derivatives infrastructure SignalPlus, leading the investment in AI-native quantitative platform Inference Research, and signing a memorandum of cooperation with Tiger Brokers and AMINA Bank on multi-asset infrastructure at Consensus Hong Kong.

According to the 13F filings submitted to the SEC, Avenir has ranked first in institutional holdings of Bitcoin ETFs in Asia for eight consecutive quarters, with BlackRock's IBIT holding over 18 million shares. Additionally, Avenir launched a $500 million quantitative partner program to provide capital and ecological support for mature quantitative trading teams and acquired the compliant Japanese trading platform BitTrade through New Fire Group. Licensed platforms, brokerage services, trading execution, quantitative capabilities, and stablecoin payments—its investment reach almost covers every aspect needed to connect the two markets.

Looking at individual projects, these investments are scattered across different products and markets. However, when viewed together, the direction becomes increasingly clear: crypto assets are entering traditional asset allocation systems, traditional financial institutions are beginning to adopt digital assets and blockchain infrastructure, and the demand for cross-market allocation and trading is surging among investors.

Li Lin's layout has long extended from investing in a single track to the connecting ground between two financial systems. This spring, New Fire Technology rebranded to New Fire Group, subsequently acquiring software assets under Avenir, and the investment and trading capabilities accumulated over years in the family office began to be systematically injected into a public platform in Hong Kong. This clue, in retrospect, seems to be a foreshadowing laid down by UMX in advance.

The industry has changed

What has prompted Li Lin to reassess the industry is not just observations on paper, but the structural shifts within the industry.

The past four years have coincided with the period when crypto finance and traditional finance have moved from mutual observation to mutual embedding. The approval of Bitcoin spot ETFs in the U.S. marked the first time digital assets were officially included in the traditional financial allocation framework. Stablecoins have transitioned from gray area funding tools to channels accepted by major economies through legislation. RWA and tokenization of stocks have allowed traditional assets like government bonds and stocks to enter the crypto context. The boundaries between brokers, custodians, clearinghouses, market makers, and trading platforms are being redrawn.

Early crypto users only operated within digital assets, while today, some professional users are living in both markets simultaneously. They monitor on-chain liquidity, as well as Federal Reserve rates, tech stock earnings, ETF fund flows, and dollar cycles. Their questions are no longer about where to buy a certain asset, but whether these assets can be integrated into the same strategy and capital framework. The previous generation of trading platforms competed on entry points, liquidity, and asset coverage; the next phase of competition may shift towards account, capital, and risk management.

These are not just hot trends, but signals. They collectively point to a fact: the era of crypto being self-contained is coming to an end, and a new continent is rising at the intersection of the two markets.

However, this new continent still lacks a proper port. The previous generation of trading platforms solved the problem of how digital assets could be traded, while DEXs addressed how on-chain assets could circulate within open protocols. Yet, to this day, almost no one has seriously answered the third question: when a professional investor simultaneously holds BTC, stablecoins, U.S. stocks, ETFs, options, and various yield-generating products, can these assets be integrated into the same account, capital framework, and risk control system?

The reality is fragmented. A user may hold a large amount of stablecoins on-chain, while having U.S. stocks and ETFs lying in a brokerage account, and still needing options, financing, and margin to execute strategies. As assets multiply, the system becomes increasingly fragmented, with money migrating back and forth between accounts, each migration draining efficiency and opportunity.

This is precisely the question UMX aims to address. It does not start from the trading entry like the previous generation of platforms, but from the asset structure of professional investors. When a person lives in both markets, how should the platform help them manage assets, allocate funds, execute strategies, and control risks?

Standing at the intersection of two markets

UMX stands for The Unified Market Exchange. The truly important part of this name is not "Exchange," but "Unified Market."

UMX positions itself as a crypto-friendly securities platform for professional investors, focusing not just on securities or crypto, but on the combination of both capabilities. Traditional brokers understand account systems, financing tools, equity arrangements, and compliance frameworks, while crypto platforms understand stablecoins, round-the-clock trading, and high-frequency capital turnover. In the past, these two capabilities existed in separate worlds; now, the new user structure is forcing them to grow together.

Recently, many crypto platforms have begun offering U.S. stock-related products, such as stock tokens, synthetic assets, and contracts for difference, providing convenient price exposure suitable for lightweight trading and short-term expressions. However, for professional investors, U.S. stocks have never been just a price entry; they care about whether the underlying assets are clear, whether the tools are complete, whether they can cover ETFs and options, and whether these capabilities can genuinely interact with digital asset positions, financing, and margins. UMX emphasizes professional U.S. stock trading for this reason; stocks are not just a subsidiary category of crypto platforms but a key asset module in the unified market.

In terms of specific trading experiences, the contours of this design become clearer. According to disclosures, a user's crypto account holds USDT and BTC. Under traditional paths, to buy U.S. stocks, one would first need to withdraw stablecoins, convert them to fiat, wait for the bank to process, and then deposit into the securities account, with each step incurring fees and time. However, in UMX's unified account, USDT can be instantly converted into dollars and transferred to the securities account, immediately creating purchasing power. If one does not want to sell BTC, they can initiate a loan transfer, using their holdings as collateral to borrow USD and transfer it over, without needing to touch their crypto position. What they buy is not a contract for difference or tokenized exposure, but real U.S. stocks with complete shareholder rights, complete with 12 order types, 8 options strategies, fractional shares starting at one dollar, and pre- and post-market trading—all included.

Even more interesting is the route for capital to flow back. Stocks like Nvidia can be converted into corresponding stock tokens, counted into the unified margin pool at applicable discount rates, supporting crypto derivatives and leveraged trading, without having to give up U.S. stock exposure for even a day. Tokens can be converted back into real stocks at any time. Even cash management and fixed-term financial products, which generate interest, can serve as margin while continuing to earn interest. In this account system, money almost no longer has idle states.

This logic does not involve groundbreaking inventions, but it points to a reorganization of asset relationships. Assets are not just held; they can be allocated. Returns are not just generated statically; they can serve as margin. Stocks are not just for long-term allocation; they can enter strategy execution alongside digital assets. The true meaning of a unified market is not to pile more assets onto one platform but to make money work more efficiently between the two markets.

Therefore, strictly speaking, UMX is not a simple replication of the logic of the previous generation of trading platforms. UMX cannot be found on the extension lines of CEX and DEX; it stands at the intersection of two markets, a crossroads that has been neglected until now.

Thirteen years later, the questions have changed

When Li Lin founded Huobi in 2013, he had just turned thirty, fixated on a glaring gap in a rough market, wielding the sharp knife of zero fees, with a fierce approach, agile stance, and a simple and direct goal: to create a better Bitcoin trading website.

Thirteen years later, that young man has reached the age of discernment. Having experienced a complete industry cycle and transitioned from a frontline entrepreneur to an investor and asset allocator, his perspective on the market has changed. Perhaps the most significant change is the question itself. The previous generation of trading platforms faced the question of "how to trade digital assets better." Today, as more and more professional investors simultaneously hold BTC, stablecoins, U.S. stocks, ETFs, options, and various yield-generating assets, the new question is: how can these assets be integrated into the same capital and risk framework?

From Avenir Group's investment landscape over the past few years to the current incubation of UMX, this thread is becoming increasingly clear.

Whether UMX can succeed will depend on real users and market cycles to validate; it is too early to draw any conclusions now. But at least this summer, that young man who once spoke of decentralization in flip-flops at Garage Cafe is once again standing at the starting point of industry narrative.

Only this time, the market has changed, and the questions are no longer the same.