Huobi Founder Li Lin Sells London Mansion The Holme for £190M After Bitcoin (BTC) Fortune

£190M Regent’s Park Sale

Li Lin, the founder of crypto exchange Huobi who built his fortune on Bitcoin (BTC) during the market’s first institutional cycle, has been identified as the seller of The Holme, a landmark mansion on London’s Regent’s Park that changed hands in June for roughly £190 million. The seller’s identity was only confirmed this week, when a Financial Times investigation published on September 12 tied the secretive transaction to Li Lin, ending months of speculation over who was behind one of Britain’s most expensive property deals. Registry detail shows Li Lin acquired the residence on December 13, 2024, for £139 million, meaning he walked away with a paper gain of roughly £51 million in about eighteen months of ownership. The June sale drew press coverage at the time, but the ownership trail was deliberately obscured: the title sits with a subsidiary of Zedra, a UK trust services provider, so Li Lin’s name never appeared in the country’s public property register. Bloomberg covered the deal in June without naming either counterparty. The buyer, according to the new reporting, is Abbas Sajwani, son of Hussain Sajwani, founder of Dubai-based property developer DAMAC. The house itself is one of London’s most storied addresses: completed in 1818 as the second villa inside Regent’s Park’s Inner Circle, it was designed by Decimus Burton at age 18 for his father James Burton, who secured the plot through his work finishing John Nash’s Regent Street project. The Holme is a Grade II* listed building with 40 bedrooms, about 2,694 square meters of floor space and roughly four acres of grounds, and its freehold remains with the Crown Estate — the buyer acquired a long leasehold, the standard structure for prime Regent’s Park property. Neighbors include London Zoo and Winfield House, the US Ambassador’s residence.

From Saudi Royals to DAMAC Heir

The Holme’s ownership history reads like a case study in how ultra-prime London property actually trades. In 1991, Quendon Ltd — a Guernsey-registered vehicle backed by the children of Saudi Prince Khaled bin Sultan al-Saud — bought the house for £34 million; creditors later seized it after a private-jet loan default. In March 2023, the mansion was listed at £250 million and marketed as Britain’s most expensive home, but it found no buyer, and the December 2024 closing at £139 million landed 44% below that ask. This year’s £190 million sale never reached the open market at all — at this price tier, outcomes depend less on listed pricing than on which buyer is sitting across the table. On-chain and fund-tracing work of the kind that ties a wallet address to a real-world owner is what ultimately connected the trust structure to Li Lin. For crypto-market readers, the more consequential thread is what Li Lin has done with the proceeds of his exchange career. He founded Huobi in 2013, built it into a venue ranked among the era’s best crypto exchanges, sold his stake and stepped away from operations in 2022, and now runs Avenir Group, a Hong Kong-based family office focused on digital assets. Avenir launched a $500 million crypto quantitative fund, Avenir Crypto, in 2024, recruiting traders who run sophisticated order types across venues. Li Lin remains the largest shareholder of Hong Kong-listed Bitfire Group (1611.HK) with a 30% stake — the company, formerly New Huo Technology and before that Huobi Technology, was renamed Bitfire at the end of March. In April, he moved Avenir’s roughly 20-person trading team into Bitfire, and the company had by then received about $500 million in investment intentions from family offices and listed companies. Bitfire’s chief executive is Livio Weng, appointed in August 2025 after serving as HashKey Group’s COO and HashKey Exchange CEO. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Binance.

Crypto Wealth Rotates Into Hard Assets

Read together, the two disclosures trace a single arc: capital earned in crypto’s first exchange era is being recycled into both hard assets and regulated digital-asset platforms. The load-bearing record here is the UK trust registration itself — The Holme’s title sits with a Zedra subsidiary, and it was that filing, not any exchange disclosure, that kept the seller anonymous for more than a year. We read the quiet £190 million exit, alongside the Avenir-Bitfire consolidation in Hong Kong, as a signal that 2013-vintage founders are rotating personal wealth into trophy property while pushing operating capital into licensed digital-asset channels.