A financial group backed by Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma has made a major foray into digital assets, investing $44 million to acquire 10,000 units of Ether, the native token of the Ethereum blockchain.
Yunfeng Financial Group Ltd., a Hong Kong-listed company in which Ma holds an 11.15% stake, disclosed the acquisition in a regulatory filing Tuesday. The company said it purchased the Ether on the open market using internal cash and would classify the asset as a long-term investment on its financial books.
The purchase marks a growing trend of publicly traded companies adding cryptocurrencies to their balance sheets, a strategy known on Wall Street as digital asset treasury, or DAT.
Yunfeng Financial said it believes the era of blockchain decentralization has arrived and pledged to deepen its embrace of the Web3 ecosystem. The firm also plans to increase its holdings of digital assets, including major tokens like Bitcoin and Solana.
The move follows a Sept. 1 announcement that Yunfeng Financial had entered a strategic partnership with Ant Digital Technologies, the technology arm of Ant Group, to expand jointly into blockchain-powered areas such as real-world asset (RWA) tokenization and Web3 services. The two companies plan to collaborate through a high-performance public chain platform named Pharos, in which Yunfeng also plans to invest.
The investment push comes on the heels of Yunfeng Financial’s July announcement outlining plans to systematically target opportunities in digital currencies, artificial intelligence, RWAs, and zero-carbon assets, particularly in the Greater Bay Area.
For the 2024 fiscal year, Yunfeng Financial reported HK$1.13 billion ($145 million) in net operating profit, up 14% year-over-year, thanks largely to its majority-owned insurance subsidiary, YF Life Insurance International Ltd. The group’s total assets rose 7% year-over-year to HK$96 billion at the end of 2024.
Yunfeng Financial is not alone in this shift. On Aug. 26, fellow Hong Kong-listed firm Sinohope Technology Holdings Ltd., whose major shareholder is Huobi crypto exchange founder Li Lin, said it had created a $500 million fund to invest in DAT projects, with a focus on mainstream digital currencies like Ether and Solana.
Contact reporter Han Wei (weihan@caixin.com)
