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Whampoa Group Makes Digital Assets Push With Investment Arm

Whampoa Group, a multi-family office anchored by principals from the Lee family that founded Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. and Amy Lee, the niece of the city-state’s founding prime minister, aims to deploy about $100 million in Web3 start-ups, through a new venture investment arm. The unit, Whampoa Digital, is seeking ventures that develop blockchain infrastructure and applications that eases the widespread adoption of Web3 technologies.

The family office last month appointed Jeffrey Ma and Peter Huo as co-chief investment officers of Whampoa Digital. Huo was most recently executive director at Binance Labs, the venture capital arm of crypto exchange Binance, while Ma was previously global head of mergers and acquisitions for digital-asset exchange Huobi.

The increasing use of decentralized finance, non-fungible tokens, blockchain games and decentralized social networks “will enable digital assets to outperform other asset classes in the coming cycle and over the long-run,” Huo said in emailed comments. Still, the sector is expected to continue to be volatile this year, affected by monetary and macroeconomic developments, he said.

Family offices tend to be less regulated than standard firms and are among the bigger players that have been looking to get into alternative investments.

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