One of Bitcoin’s Earliest Miners Is Dedicating $66M in Crypto to a Fund of Funds

Bixin, one of the earliest bitcoin miner operators and wallet startups, is dedicating 6,600 bitcoin, worth $66 million, to a new fund of funds.

The company announced the fund of funds with its proprietary capital on Friday, and said it aims to invest in global quantitative trading funds whose strategies are based on arbitrage, bitcoin futures contracts and trend analysis.

By providing additional liquidity and market-making activities to these trading desks amid bitcoin's scheduled halving event, Bixin seeks to increase its holdings in bitcoin as part of its "unwavering commitment to bitcoin," the firm said in the announcement.

"We are strong believers in bitcoin and it's not what we want to see that the bitcoin ecosystem in China and elsewhere are in a silo," said Liu Fei, who joined Bixin from the Huobi exchange in late 2018 and now oversees Bixin's mining business and the fund of funds. "We hope the fund of funds can contribute to a better global liquidity structure for the bitcoin ecosystem."

Founded in 2014 by Wu Gang, who started mining bitcoin since as early as 2009, Bixin has become one of the most known bitcoin wallet and mining pool operators in China.

It scaled up the investment in bitcoin self-mining in the late 2018 and early 2019 bearish market and is currently operating bitcoin mining facilities of about 300 megawatt-hour, roughly 3,000 petahashes per second (PH/s) of computing power that accounts for 2.5% of the Bitcoin network's total.

Bixin established an investment and financial service arm around 2018 with its own capital and has invested in leading crypto startups in China including MicroBT, a serious contenders against mining giant Bitmain's dominance in bitcoin miner hardware business.