On October 26, BITFIRE GROUP (01611) announced its operating data for September and the third quarter of 2026 for the first time — this marks the company's first complete "report card" since it declared a strategic transformation at the end of August 2025. Six months ago the figure stood at US$85 million, and now it has reached US$221 million; the capacity of New Fire's asset management pool has expanded 1.6 times over two quarters and seven times over a year. Custody assets jumped from US$9.47 million to US$52.68 million, a 5.6-fold increase in half a year. Quarterly trading volume reached US$342 million, with a compound growth rate of 66.0%. According to statistics, the group's client count rolled from 156 to 2,082, a 12.3-fold increase in one year — on average, this company adds five new names to its roster every single day. Combined with the steep growth curve of a 141.8% surge in gross profit shown in the 2026 interim report — with Q3 likely maintaining strong momentum — on the map of Asia's digital asset finance, BITFIRE GROUP is using a set of striking operating data to send a clear signal to the secondary market: the strategic transformation from a low-margin OTC trader to a digital asset wealth manager has entered its harvest period.
When AUM Becomes the Main Axis: Trading and Trust Are Both Accelerating
Breaking it down, New Fire's growth is not a solo performance by any single business line, but a multi-line resonance across asset management, trading, and trust services. The asset management business is the brightest line: AUM in asset management grew from US$85 million to US$221 million, with a half-year compound growth rate of 60.8%, and asset management clients increased from 41 to 71. On the product matrix, Alpha BTC — Hong Kong's first compliant BTC-denominated asset management service — focuses on steady appreciation, while the market-neutral quantitative arbitrage strategy, with an annualized return of 15.66%, a Sharpe ratio of 7.22, and a maximum drawdown of only 0.82% in live trading records, has become a rare offering in volatile markets — this set of data is decoupled from coin price movements, making it exactly the "ballast stone" that high-net-worth clients need most during volatile cycles.
The crypto asset trading business is also picking up speed: third-quarter trading volume reached US$342 million, with a quarterly compound growth rate of 66.0%. But the steepest growth came from the trust and custody business — custody assets jumped from US$9.47 million to US$52.68 million, with a compound growth rate as high as 135.9%, and the number of custody clients nearly doubled in half a year to 756. Custody is the front station of asset management; only when clients first entrust their assets to the company on the basis of trust can entrusted management even be discussed — this indicator leads AUM. From a chain perspective, this is not a victory for each business line separately, but the beginning of a positive cycle: "trading brings traffic — custody builds trust — asset management takes over assets."
The sequential rotation of these three flywheels stems from BITFIRE GROUP's strategic transformation in August 2025. At that time, New Fire announced its transformation into a "private-banking-grade digital asset steward," and subsequently completed milestone arrangements in 2026: in March it officially changed its name and launched the international brand "Bitfire"; in April it acquired Avenir's investment and trading operating system; in May it launched Hong Kong's first compliant BTC-denominated asset management product, "Alpha BTC"; and in August it entered the RWA integrated operations business. It is worth noting that in October, Euromoney 2026 named BITFIRE GROUP "Best Digital Prime Broker in Asia-Pacific," and the institutions on the same list were all established financial giants such as HSBC, UBS, and DBS Bank, while New Fire became the only Hong Kong Web3-native financial institution selected. This series of moves is not a scattered set of attempts, but a complete strategic puzzle — based on Hong Kong SFC Type 1, 4, and 9 licenses and a TCSP trust license, plus licenses in the United States and Canada — providing compliance assurance for global digital asset circulation and building a full-chain compliant service system covering trading, asset management, custody, and trust.
Gross Profit Doubles: Revenue Structure Actively Replaced, Financial Inflection Point May Have Emerged
Scale is running forward at high speed, but profit realization lags, and at this stage the group's financial inflection point may not yet have arrived. Still, from the latest business and financial data, it can be seen that the group's revenue structure has already begun to undergo profound changes, and the transformation remains in the process of continuous advancement. Behind a set of seemingly contradictory figures in the 2026 interim report is the group's active replacement of its business structure: the 2026 interim results show revenue of HK$1.966 billion, down 43.1% year-on-year — what shrank was low-margin trading-related revenue; gross profit of HK$27 million, up 141.8% year-on-year — what grew was new high-margin businesses such as asset management and custody. The revenue structure is being actively replaced. The loss before tax was HK$245 million, but HK$154 million of that was a paper loss from changes in the fair value of crypto assets, which does not generate cash outflow; what truly reflects the will to invest is that R&D expenses rose 139.8% year-on-year and administrative expenses rose 210.3% — licenses, systems, and teams are all upfront investments.
It should be clarified that there is an obvious time lag between operating data and financial data: AUM, custody scale, and client numbers are all leading indicators, while revenue recognition from management fees and performance fees lags behind scale growth. In other words, scale has already run ahead, and reported profit is a lagging variable for realization. The doubling of gross profit is precisely the watershed signal of the switch from the investment period to the harvest period.
Sustainability of Growth: Four Barriers
The next thing the market wants to ask is whether growth can continue and how deep its supporting foundation is. The first barrier is the platformization of licenses and products. New Fire is the only listed company in Hong Kong that simultaneously holds SFC Type 1, 4, and 9 licenses and a TCSP trust license, and it is also the first licensed institution authorized to provide discretionary account management for virtual assets, supplemented by MSB licenses in the United States and Canada and dual licenses in Japan, forming a full-chain compliance loop covering trading, asset management, custody, and trust. In Hong Kong's market where "a license is a barrier," these four certificates together represent the trust ceiling for client acquisition and the compliance moat for scale expansion.
The second is an all-star management team. In August 2025, core executives from the former Huobi and HashKey — Weng Xiaoqi, Xing Yue, Guo Wenbin, and others, known as the "Seventh Master" — officially announced their joining of New Fire, and in the same year the company completed a series of major moves including the acquisition and consolidation of Japanese exchange BitTrade, the release of its new strategy, and a brand upgrade; in April 2026, New Fire brought in about 20 investment research, trading, and risk control personnel from Li Lin family office Avenir's system, along with the entire AvenirX system — this team has long engaged in large-scale OTC, funding rate arbitrage, basis arbitrage, dynamic hedging, and option enhancement, and has weathered multiple rounds of extreme market conditions. In June, renowned economist Fu Peng joined as chief economist to build a macroeconomic research and institutional strategy system. The former provides practical Alpha, while the latter completes the macroeconomic research framework, moving products from "able to make money" toward "explainable, replicable, and institutionalizable."
The third is dual-market depth. Hong Kong provides an asset management highland and institutional capital, while Japan's BitTrade provides retail traffic and compliant fiat channels — 306,000 users and US$113 million in custody and wealth management assets, which is both a cash flow cushion and a replicable model for the Hong Kong approach. The fourth is a platform-based revenue ladder. The first layer is exchange trading revenue (BitTrade), providing stable cash flow; the second layer is fee-based revenue from asset management and custody (Bitfire Premium), opening up high-margin space; the third layer is RWA, prime brokerage, and platform-based operating revenue. Once these three-level transitions run smoothly, New Fire's revenue will shift from "trading commissions dependent on market conditions" to a financial services model of "continuous fees based on AUM."
Conclusion
Viewed from a higher dimension, BITFIRE GROUP's strategic narrative mirrors the broader trend of the digital asset industry evolving from "wild growth" to "compliant institution-building." As global financial infrastructure accelerates its restructuring toward tokenization, compliance is no longer optional but a ticket to entry. With Hong Kong as its fulcrum and licensed permits as its lever, what New Fire is building is not only a digital asset wealth management company, but also an institutional-grade service infrastructure connecting traditional finance with the Web3 world. For institutional investors in the secondary market, paying attention to BITFIRE GROUP is essentially betting on a larger proposition — in the process of digital assets moving from marginal innovation to mainstream financial architecture, whoever can first secure a position in compliant infrastructure will seize the initiative in the next round of value revaluation.
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