UMX, incubated by Li Lin’s Avenir Group, entered public beta in the summer of 2026, drawing fresh attention to one of the earliest Chinese entrepreneurs in crypto.
Thirteen years have passed since Li founded Huobi in 2013. Back then, the question was simple: how to make Bitcoin easier to trade for more people. Today, crypto has moved well beyond a self-contained digital asset market and into a phase where it increasingly intersects with ETFs, stablecoins, real-world assets and traditional securities.
Li’s role has changed with that shift. In 2023, he founded Avenir Group in Hong Kong and moved from front-line founder to investor and capital allocator, building around digital assets, securities trading and financial infrastructure. UMX now appears under the label of being incubated by Avenir Group, giving those investment moves from the past few years a new frame.
From Huobi founder to allocator in Hong Kong
To understand this return, it helps to start with the exit that came before it.
Huobi launched in September 2013, the year Bitcoin ran from RMB 800 to RMB 8,000. It was also the period just before Mt.Gox collapsed, when the industry still had a frontier feel. Li, who is from Hengyang, graduated from Tsinghua University’s automation department, wrote code at Oracle and had already gone through two startup attempts. He used a permanent zero-fee strategy to break into a Bitcoin trading market that was still rough around the edges. Within six months of launch, Huobi’s daily trading volume topped RMB 1.5 billion. At its peak, it held more than half of the global Bitcoin trading market. ZhenFund, Dai Zhikang and Sequoia Capital followed, and Li became one of the most familiar founder faces in Chinese crypto.
Over the next decade, Huobi and Li went through a full industry cycle, from crypto’s early expansion to global compliance competition. For a founder, that period produced more than experience in running a trading platform. It also built a set of views on trading, liquidity, user demand, account systems and risk.
Running a platform and allocating capital are not the same exercise. In 2023, Li established Avenir Group in Hong Kong. The name comes from French and means “a better future.” The change from exchange operator to manager of a multi-strategy family office also changed the way he viewed the market.
He had once been on the field, focused on user growth, trading volume, product lines and liquidity. As a capital allocator on the sidelines, he now saw another set of questions: where capital sits idle, where assets get split up, why accounts cannot connect and why risk is so hard to manage under one system.
Those issues are harder to spot from inside an exchange, which is structurally focused on its own venue. From an allocator’s seat, they stand out.
Avenir’s investments point to a single direction
Avenir’s activity in the past few years sketches out a clear line.
The firm built a stake of more than 10% in UP Fintech, the parent company of Tiger Brokers. It joined Hong Kong licensed platform OSL’s $300 million equity financing as a core investor. It backed institutional order-routing company CoinRoutes and options derivatives infrastructure provider SignalPlus. It also led investment in AI-native quant platform Inference Research and signed a memorandum on multi-asset infrastructure with Tiger Brokers and AMINA Bank at Consensus Hong Kong.
According to 13F filings submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Avenir has ranked first in Asia for institutional Bitcoin ETF holdings for eight consecutive quarters. Its position in BlackRock’s IBIT alone exceeds 18 million shares. Avenir also launched a $500 million quant partner program to provide capital and ecosystem support for mature quantitative trading teams, and it acquired Japan-regulated exchange BitTrade through New Huo Group.
Licensed venues, brokerage, trade execution, quantitative capabilities and stablecoin payments all show up in that list. Looked at one by one, the investments span different markets and product categories. Taken together, the direction becomes easier to read: crypto assets are entering traditional asset allocation systems, traditional financial institutions are adopting digital assets and blockchain infrastructure, and investor demand for cross-market allocation and trading is climbing.
Li’s positioning has moved beyond backing isolated sectors. It now sits in the connective layer between two financial systems. This spring, New Huo Technology was renamed New Huo Group, and later acquired software assets under Avenir. Trading and investment capabilities accumulated in the family office structure began to flow into a publicly listed Hong Kong platform. In hindsight, that sequence looks close to a setup for UMX.
The industry has changed, and so has the question
What pushed Li to reassess the sector was not just portfolio observation. It was the structural shift of the industry itself.
The last four years have also been the four years in which crypto finance and traditional finance moved from watching each other to embedding into each other. Spot Bitcoin ETFs were approved in the United States, bringing digital assets into the formal allocation framework of traditional finance for the first time. Stablecoins moved from being gray-zone rails for deposits and withdrawals to capital channels accepted through legislation in major economies. Real-world assets and stock tokenization brought Treasuries and equities into crypto’s vocabulary. The lines separating brokers, custodians, clearing firms, market makers and trading venues have started to move.
Early crypto users mostly operated inside digital assets alone. Today, part of the professional user base lives in both markets at once. They watch on-chain liquidity, but also Federal Reserve rates, tech earnings, ETF fund flows and the U.S. dollar cycle. The question is no longer where to buy an asset. It is whether those assets can be placed inside one strategy set and one capital framework.
The previous generation of trading platforms competed on access, liquidity and asset coverage. The next round could revolve around accounts, capital and risk management.
That is not a passing narrative. It points to a broader change: the era of crypto as a fully separate system is fading, and the overlap between the two markets is turning into its own space.
That space still lacks a proper port. The last generation of platforms answered how digital assets could be traded. DEXs answered how on-chain assets could circulate in open protocols. A third question remains largely unanswered: when a professional investor holds BTC, stablecoins, U.S. equities, ETFs, options and yield products at the same time, can those positions sit inside one account structure, one capital framework and one risk system?
Right now, the answer is fragmented. A user may hold large amounts of stablecoins on-chain, keep U.S. stocks and ETFs in a brokerage account, and still need options, financing and margin to run a strategy. Assets are expanding while systems remain split apart. Capital has to move back and forth between accounts, and each move costs time, fees or missed opportunity.
That is the problem UMX says it wants to solve. It does not start from trade entry. It starts from the asset structure of a professional investor and asks how a platform should help manage assets, move capital, execute strategies and control risk when a user lives across both markets.
Why UMX stresses “Unified Market”
UMX stands for The Unified Market Exchange. In that name, the weight sits less on “Exchange” than on “Unified Market.”
UMX describes itself as a crypto-friendly securities platform for professional investors. The center of gravity is not securities alone or crypto alone, but the combination of both capabilities. Traditional brokers understand account systems, financing tools, shareholder rights and compliance structures. Crypto platforms understand stablecoins, 24/7 trading and high-frequency capital turnover. Those strengths used to belong to separate worlds. The new user structure is pulling them together.
Over the past period, many crypto platforms have rolled out U.S. equity-linked products, including stock tokens, synthetic assets and contracts for difference. Those instruments provide easy price exposure and work for lighter trading and short-term positioning. Professional investors usually want more. They care about whether the underlying asset is clear, whether the tool set is complete, whether ETFs and options are covered, and whether those functions can actually connect with digital asset positions, financing and margin.
That is why UMX emphasizes professional U.S. stock trading. Equities are not presented as an add-on category inside a crypto venue, but as a core asset module inside a unified market.
One account, one margin pool, cross-market capital use
The product design becomes clearer in the trading flow described in the article.
If a user holds USDT and BTC in a crypto account and wants to buy U.S. stocks through the traditional route, the process usually requires withdrawing stablecoins, converting into fiat currency, waiting for the bank transfer to arrive, and then funding a securities account. Each step takes time and adds cost.
Inside UMX’s unified account, USDT can be converted into U.S. dollars with one click and moved into a securities account to create immediate buying power. If the user does not want to sell BTC, the platform can enable a lending transfer, using the position as collateral to borrow USD and move that over as well. The crypto holding itself does not have to be sold.
The stock purchased is not a CFD or tokenized proxy. It is described as a real U.S. equity position with full shareholder rights. The platform lists 12 order types, 8 options combination strategies, fractional shares starting from $1, and pre-market and after-hours trading.
The return path for capital is also part of the design. A user’s NVIDIA shares can be converted into corresponding stock tokens through a stock-to-token process and included in a unified margin pool based on the applicable haircut, supporting crypto derivatives and leveraged trading. The U.S. equity exposure does not have to be abandoned for that to happen, and the token can be converted back into the real stock at any time. Cash-management and fixed-term yield products can continue to accrue income while also serving as margin.
In that account system, capital is no longer meant to sit idle.
There is no dramatic invention at the center of this logic. What it suggests is a reordering of asset relationships. Assets are not only held; they can be mobilized. Yield is not only collected; it can support margin. Stocks are not only long-term allocations; they can also work alongside digital assets inside strategy execution. The practical meaning of a unified market is not putting more asset classes onto one screen. It is making capital work more efficiently across both markets.
By that measure, UMX is not a simple replay of the last generation of trading platforms. It does not fit neatly on an extension of either the centralized exchange model or the DEX model. It is positioned at the intersection of two markets, targeting a junction that few have seriously tried to build around.
Thirteen years later, Li is facing a different problem
When Li founded Huobi in 2013, he was just past 30 and looking at a visible gap in a rough market. A zero-fee strategy gave him speed, flexibility and a direct goal: build a better Bitcoin trading website.
Thirteen years later, after living through a full market cycle and moving from founder to investor and allocator, the way he sees the market has shifted. The bigger change may be the question itself. The previous generation of platforms dealt with how digital assets could be traded more effectively. Today, as more professional investors hold BTC, stablecoins, U.S. stocks, ETFs, options and income-generating assets at the same time, the new question is how those positions can be used within one capital and risk framework.
From Avenir Group’s investment map over the past few years to the incubation of UMX, that line is becoming easier to see.
Whether UMX can work still has to be tested by real users and real market cycles, and the article does not draw a firm conclusion. But in the summer of 2026, Li Lin once again stands near the starting point of a new industry narrative. The market has changed. So has the problem.