Jack Ma-Linked Yunfeng Financial Buys Ether While Expanding Into ‘Frontier Areas’

Yunfeng Financial Group, a Hong Kong-based provider of brokerage, asset management, insurance and FinTech services that is linked to Jack Ma, disclosed Tuesday (Sept. 2) that it invested $44 million to acquire 10,000 ether (ETH) as reserve assets.

“The ETH are accounted for as investments in the financial statements of the Group,” the firm said in a Tuesday voluntary announcement. “The Group will continue to closely monitor market developments, the regulatory environment and the Company’s financial position to adjust the scale of the reserve assets as necessary.”

In the announcement, Yunfeng Financial said its board of directors announced on July 14 that the Group planned to expand into “frontier areas” like Web3, real world assets (RWA), digital currency, ESG Net Zero Assets and artificial intelligence, as well as increasing its investments in digital currency.

“The Board believes that the ETH’s inclusion as the Company’s strategic reserve assets is consistent with the Group’s layout of expansion into frontier areas including Web3, and provides key infrastructure support for the Real World Assets (RWA) tokenization activities,” Yunfeng Financial said in the Sept. 3 announcement.

The company said the addition of ETH will also facilitate the Group’s innovation in the Web3 field, enable it to integrate finance with technology for its clients, explore potential applications in its insurance business, and reduce its reliance on traditional currencies.

“The Board wishes to emphasize that the cryptocurrency market is highly volatile, and the price of ETH may fluctuate significantly due to factors such as macroeconomic and regulatory changes,” the announcement said.

CoinDesk reported Tuesday that Yunfeng Financial is linked to Jack Ma, co-founder of Ant Group and Alibaba, via its majority owner, Shanghai-based Yunfeng Capital, which was co-founded by Ma in 2010.

The report added that some public firms have adopted ether treasury strategies in an effort to emulate the bitcoin treasury strategy of Michael Saylor’s Strategy.

In Yunfeng Financial’s July 14 voluntary announcement of its plan to move into frontier areas, the company said it wants to build upon its existing insurance and FinTech businesses and explore how the frontier areas can be integrated with applications in those businesses.