Dan Bin makes a move, building a position in Circle

Author: Lawyer Liu Honglin

Tonight, I came across a rather unremarkable piece of news: according to the latest disclosed 13F filing, an overseas fund under Dongfang Harbor bought more than 30,000 shares of Circle in the most recent reporting period. The position is worth more than 3 million USD, accounting for less than 0.3% of the fund’s total portfolio.

If you look only at this number, there’s actually nothing particularly special about it. At this level of allocation, such positioning is pretty common among many institutions.

But the fact that the target is Circle is what makes this story a bit more interesting.

What is Circle: The business logic of stablecoin issuers

Circle is one of the stablecoin issuers, and in 2025 it went public on the NYSE. If you break its business down, it’s quite straightforward: users exchange USD for USDC, and then the company uses that money to invest in short-term U.S. Treasuries or holds it in banks, earning the spread.

Seen from this angle, Circle is more like a finance business that you can actually run the numbers on, rather than a project that’s just about storytelling.

Circle itself has also gone through a fairly typical process of being repeatedly repriced by the market. When it listed, its offering price was $31. After listing, market sentiment was once quite high: the share price was quickly pushed above $200, and its market capitalization also at one point surged into the hundreds of billions. But later, there was a fairly clear pullback, with no small degree of volatility.

On the surface, it’s just the price moving around. But underneath, the market is repeatedly deciding how to value the company—should it be valued based on the crypto industry, based on financial companies, or a mix of both?

Why did Dongfang Harbor buy Circle?

So rather than calling this a “crypto-market news” item, I think it’s better understood as news about Dongfang Harbor.

If you know something about Dai Bin’s investment style, you’d probably realize that his path over the years has been fairly consistent. From consumer and internet to tech leaders, at its core he’s looking for companies with relatively strong certainty—ones that can be held long term. Stylistically, he’s also always been quite restrained, especially when it comes to assets that are highly volatile and hard to price; he rarely takes positions that are so heavily weighted.

That’s also why, even though the crypto industry has been so hot in recent years, you rarely see this kind of capital directly buying Bitcoin or various tokens.

So why buy Circle this time? My understanding is that, compared with directly buying tokens, a company like Circle—at least in a few ways—is more acceptable to traditional capital:

It’s a listed company. There are financial reports and disclosures, so it can be analyzed in familiar ways.

It has revenue, and its revenue logic is relatively clear—mainly coming from spreads.

What it does is also fairly focused—centered on stablecoins.

In other words, as a traditional investment institution, you can use your existing toolkit to roughly judge whether it’s a business worth participating in.

Due to the nature of my work, Lawyer Honglin often exchanges ideas with many investment friends in daily conversations. In recent years, many mainstream funds have been looking at Web3 and doing research on it, but not many have truly entered at a large scale.

The reasons aren’t complicated: directly buying crypto assets has too much volatility; buying tokens makes fundamental analysis very difficult; participating in early-stage projects involves too much information asymmetry.

Very often, people may roughly agree on the direction, but can’t find an easy, comfortable way to participate.

Companies like Circle, to some extent, provide a path that’s easier to accept. You don’t need to directly take on the extreme price fluctuations of tokens, and you don’t need to judge whether a particular project can break out. Instead, you participate in the part of the industry that grows gradually—through a company.

The stablecoin narrative is changing

Looking further, the stablecoin story itself is also gradually changing.

In the past, people used it mainly for transaction convenience or for certain on-chain operations. But now some scenarios are becoming different—more and more cross-border payment scenarios, and more online e-commerce—so the use cases for stablecoins are expanding.

And with this wave of AI becoming a big hit, people have started to pay attention to the logic of using stablecoins after AI participates in trading, because stablecoins themselves are a set of tools that can execute automatically and settle anytime.

So for the stablecoin business, it doesn’t necessarily need a huge definition. Put simply: as more people use it and use it in more places, the business starts to look more like something that can be carried on long term.

What’s behind the 3 million USD: a traditional capital entry path

Returning to the article’s theme, the 3 million USD position itself is, of course, not that important.

But it does provide a pretty clear answer: when traditional capital truly starts to take Web3 seriously, their first reaction isn’t to buy tokens. Instead, they first look for targets that can be understood as “companies.”

In other words, they’re not stepping into a completely new world right away. They first approach it in ways that feel familiar.

From this perspective, companies like Circle essentially play a “translator” role—connecting on-chain applications on one side and the traditional capital/finance system on the other. You may not understand the whole industry, but you can at least understand what it does, how the money comes in, and where the risks are.

This is also something many people underestimate. If Web3 stays only at the level of prices and narratives, it’s hard for traditional capital to really enter. But once a group of companies emerge that can be explained clearly and placed onto balance sheets, the way to participate in this industry will change.

So what Dongfang Harbor bought may not be just Circle. Fundamentally, it’s testing a path: not going directly in as a player, but standing aside first to find a position that you can understand and hold over the long term.

As for whether this path is ultimately the best solution, that’s still uncertain. But what can be said with confidence is that as more money enters Web3 in this way, the industry itself will gradually become different.