HKEX-listed tech firm launches $15M Bitcoin fund

Linekong Interactive, a gaming and film production company headquartered in Beijing and listed on The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong (HKEX), is allocating $15 million to invest in projects building on the Bitcoin network.

Wang Fang, the founder of Linekong, said in a Nov. 8 tweet that the fund, dubbed “BTC Next,” will be used to accelerate emerging projects in the Bitcoin ecosystem, including “asset issuance protocols, trading markets, expansion, virtual machines, NFT, RWA, and GameFi.”

For initial efforts, the firm would “participate in the research and investment of Bitcoin network ecological assets as early as possible,” publish its investment portfolios, and update the list of Bitcoin ecological crypto assets. “The panoramic curtain of the Bitcoin network ecology has slowly unfolded,” BTC Next wrote. Traditionally, Bitcoin lacked the programmability associated with newer blockchains such as Ethereum, remaining for most periods largely unchanged from its invention in 2008. 

However, the Bitcoin ecosystem has expanded greatly this year with the invention of Ordinals and Inscriptions, two novel data storage methods that together, allow users to mint unique digital assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. 

In June, cross-chain wallet BitKeep (now Bitget Wallet) added deposit and withdrawal support for BRC-20 Bitcoin tokens modeled on the Ethereum ERC-20 standard. On November 7, Binance listed popular BRC-20 token Ordinals (ORDI), causing its value to surge more than 40% in a single day. BRC-20 tokens have altogether reached $1.36 billion in market cap since their inception. 

更新/这件事情在我心里酝酿100天了，我们要启动一个BTC NEXT，加密市场的下一步离不开比特币网络的焕然一新。蓝港互动的成长，见过风起云涌，那时候，是和个人电脑、智能手机、互联网和游戏一起走过来的。我们的下一步，要和比特币网络的发展紧紧联系起来。

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— 小隐新十年（WangFeng） (@wangfeng_0128) November 8, 2023

Founded in 2007 in Beijing as an online gaming firm, Linekong Interactive first went public in Hong Kong in 2014. Before founding Linekong, Wang Feng was a vice president of software development at Kingsoft Software, a Chinese IT conglomerate. 

Feng resigned as CEO of Linekong in 2018 to focus on blockchain, founding several projects in the nonfungible tokens, decentralized finance, and Bitcoin mining space. He returned to Linekong as CEO in 2022 after an invitation from the firm’s board of directors to better integrate Linekong products with Web3.

Related: Swiss crypto bank SEBA gets Hong Kong SFC license