Dan Bin takes action, building a position in Circle

Author: Lawyer Liu Honglin

I came across a rather inconspicuous piece of news in the evening: According to the latest disclosed 13F filings, the overseas fund under Dongfang Gangwan has newly purchased over 30,000 shares of Circle in the latest reporting period, with a market value of over three million dollars, accounting for less than 0.3% of the entire portfolio.

If we only look at this number, there is nothing particularly special about it; such levels of positions are quite common in many institutions.

However, the nature of this target makes this matter a bit interesting.

What is Circle: The Business Logic of a Stablecoin Issuer

Circle is one of the stablecoin issuers and just went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2025. Breaking down its business, it is actually quite simple: users exchange dollars for USDC, and the company takes this money to invest in short-term U.S. Treasury bonds or deposits it in banks to earn a spread.

From this perspective, it resembles a financial business that can be accounted for, rather than a purely narrative-driven project.

The company Circle itself has also gone through a fairly typical process of "being repeatedly priced by the market." Its initial public offering price was $31, and after going public, market sentiment was quite high, with the stock price quickly pushed above $200, and its market value once surged into the hundreds of billions. However, there was a noticeable pullback later, with significant volatility.

On the surface, it appears to be price fluctuations, but behind it, the market is repeatedly judging: how should this company be valued—by looking at it through the lens of the crypto industry, or as a financial company, or a bit of both?

Why Did Dongfang Gangwan Buy Circle?

Therefore, rather than saying this is a "crypto news," it is more accurate to say this is news about Dongfang Gangwan.

If one understands Dan Bin's investment style, it becomes clear that his path over the years has been quite consistent, moving from consumption and the internet to leading technology firms, essentially looking for companies with strong certainty that can be held for the long term. His style has also been quite restrained, especially regarding assets that are highly volatile and difficult to price; he rarely directly participates with heavy positions.

This is also why, despite the crypto industry's heat in recent years, you rarely see such funds directly buying Bitcoin or various tokens.

So why buy Circle this time? My understanding is that compared to directly buying coins, companies like Circle have at least a few aspects that traditional funds can accept:

It is a publicly traded company, with financial reports and disclosures, allowing for analysis in familiar ways.

It has revenue, and the revenue logic is relatively clear, mainly coming from interest spreads.

Its operations are also quite focused, revolving around stablecoins.

In other words, as a traditional investment institution, one can use the original methods to roughly judge whether it is a business worth participating in.

Due to work reasons, Lawyer Honglin often communicates with many friends in investment, and many mainstream funds have been looking at Web3 and researching it in recent years, but very few have actually entered on a large scale.

The reasons are not complicated: directly buying cryptocurrencies involves too much volatility; buying tokens makes fundamental analysis difficult; participating in early projects suffers from strong information asymmetry.

Many times, there is a general agreement on direction, but they cannot find a convenient way to participate.

Companies like Circle, to some extent, provide a more acceptable path. You do not need to directly bear the severe price fluctuations of coins, nor do you need to judge whether a project can succeed; instead, you participate in the slowly growing part of the entire industry through a company.

The Narrative of Stablecoins is Changing

Looking further, the stablecoin business itself is also slowly changing.

In the past, people used it more for transaction convenience or to perform some on-chain operations. But now, some scenarios are starting to look different—more and more cross-border payment scenarios, more and more online e-commerce, and the usage scenarios for stablecoins are becoming increasingly widespread. With the recent surge in AI, people are beginning to pay attention to how AI participates in trading and the usage logic of stablecoins—because it is inherently a set of tools that can be executed automatically and settled at any time.

Therefore, for the stablecoin business, it does not necessarily need a grand definition; simply put, as more people use it and in more places, this business starts to resemble a long-term viable business.

Behind the $3 Million is the Entry Path of Traditional Funds

Returning to the main topic of this article, this $3 million position is, of course, not important in itself.

However, it actually provides a fairly clear answer: when traditional funds really start to look seriously at Web3, their first reaction is not to buy coins but to first look for targets that can be understood as "companies."

In other words, they are not participating in a completely new world; instead, they are approaching this world using familiar methods.

From this perspective, companies like Circle essentially play a "translation" role—connecting on-chain applications with the traditional financial system. You may not understand the entire industry, but at least you can first understand what it is doing, where the money comes from, and what the risks are.

This is actually something many people underestimate. If Web3 only stays at the level of price and narrative, traditional funds will find it hard to truly enter; but once a batch of companies that can be clearly explained and included in balance sheets starts to emerge, the way to participate in this industry will change.

Therefore, what Dongfang Gangwan bought may not just be Circle; essentially, it is trying a path: not directly entering as a player but first standing on the sidelines, looking for a position that is understandable and can be held for the long term.

As for whether this path is ultimately the optimal solution, it is still uncertain. But what is certain is that as more and more money begins to enter Web3 in this way, the industry itself will gradually become different.