Hong Kong-listed Yunfeng Financial Group, a company with close ties to billionaire entrepreneur and Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, has allocated 10,000 ETH as a reserve asset.
In a disclosure published on September 2, Yunfeng Financial Group said it had purchased the Ether using internal cash reserves.
At current prices, the acquisition marks an investment of roughly $44 million, making it one of the more substantial corporate ETH purchases this quarter in Hong Kong.
Yunfeng Financial Group classifies ETH as a reserve asset
For the financial services firm known for its presence in the insurance sector, the investment was made as a bid to deepen its roots in the web3 space, specifically the tokenized real-world assets (RWA) and other emerging sectors like artificial intelligence and digital finance.
Ether was chosen specifically to anchor this transition.
According to Yunfeng’s board, Ethereum’s role in enabling smart contract platforms, decentralized finance, and RWA tokenization makes it a “key strategic asset” as the company ramps up exposure to frontier technologies.
The group expects the ETH holding to eventually “support RWA tokenization, technological innovation, and the broader integration of finance with Web3 infrastructure.”
Interestingly, Yunfeng is not just treating ETH as a speculative asset. The company has officially designated it as a strategic reserve asset, placing it alongside traditional assets on the balance sheet.
“The ETH are accounted for as investments in the financial statements of the Group,” the announcement read.
Another intent was diversification, which the firm believes will help it reduce its reliance on fiat currencies.
Down the line, Yunfend plans to explore the Ethereum blockchain’s usability within the insurance market and modern-day business scenarios that are tailored to decentralised finance.
“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,” an excerpt from the announcement read, strongly implying that this 10,000 ETH purchase may be just the opening move.
ETH treasury companies keep buying
Yunfeng’s latest investment can be considered a drop in the bucket compared to the much larger allocations made by other publicly traded firms into the second-largest cryptocurrency.
Over the past few weeks, several major Ethereum treasury plays have surfaced.
Most notably, The Ether Machine raised $654 million in private capital to build up a massive ETH treasury, securing 150,000 ETH from longtime crypto advocate Jeffrey Berns, who has since joined its board.
The company now holds over 345,000 ETH and is expected to go public with nearly half a million ETH on its books.
BitMine Immersion Technologies, another major ETH treasury player headed by Fundstrat’s Tom Lee, disclosed a staggering 1.87 million ETH in holdings, currently valued at around $8.1 billion.
And then there’s ETHZilla Corporation, which rebranded from biotech firm 180 Life Sciences and pivoted into the Ethereum space with backing from Polychain, Electric Capital, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.
ETHZilla now holds over 94,000 ETH and has partnered with DeFi protocols to optimize yield via staking, lending, and liquidity provisioning.
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