Former Blackstone Group merger expert Zheng Zhiliang and Tether co-founder Reeve Collins have teamed up to raise $1 billion through the SPAC company MBAV, creating a publicly listed diversified crypto fund.
Written by: Luke, Mars Finance
According to Bloomberg, former Blackstone Group merger legend Zheng Zhiliang (Chinh Chu) is collaborating with Tether co-founder Reeve Collins to raise up to $1 billion through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) M3-Brigade Acquisition V Corp. (MBAV) to establish a publicly listed diversified crypto fund.
When top players from "old Wall Street" stand alongside the architects of "crypto newcomers," the market's attention naturally focuses. This is not merely a simple aggregation of capital, but the first deep integration of two distinctly different power paradigms—"reputational power" built on impeccable credentials and institutional trust, and "structural power" rooted in the foundational infrastructure of the market. However, interpreting this merely as another "basket" crypto ETF could miss the key to this grand strategy. It resembles a meticulously designed "structural acquisition"—they are acquiring not just assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, but are attempting to build a new "crypto asset management platform" that can be understood and traded by traditional capital markets.
This raises the question: After institutional funds complete their "beginner tasks" at the door of Bitcoin ETFs, is the true value of this "advanced" investment vehicle created by Zheng Zhiliang and Collins being underestimated by the market? Is it a new tool for Wall Street capital to incorporate the crypto world, or a new species aimed at creating long-term value, comparable to "Berkshire Hathaway" in the crypto realm?
When "Wall Street's firewall" meets "crypto-native OS"
Any disruptive product derives its genes from its founders. The combination of Zheng Zhiliang and Collins perfectly merges two of the most needed trust credentials in the market: impeccable compliance pedigree and deep-rooted native insight.
Who is Zheng Zhiliang? He is a veteran of Blackstone with 25 years of experience, a "value hunter" who has led multi-billion dollar mergers with German chemical giant Celanese and financial software company SunGard. These transactions are known for their complex structures, intense negotiations, and precise excavation of long-term value, bringing billions of dollars in profits to Blackstone. His name represents a "reputation firewall" for traditional institutional investors. He embodies the most rigorous due diligence, the most mature risk control, and the top-tier institutional connections, creating a "Chu Premium" that the market cannot ignore.
After leaving Blackstone, his firm CC Capital continued this "architect" investment philosophy, successfully bringing entities like Getty Images to the public market through SPACs, proving he is already a master of public financial instruments. His entry essentially serves as an "authoritative due diligence" of the entire diversified crypto track, announcing to the market: this field has been scrutinized by Wall Street's top minds and possesses analyzable, priceable, and long-term holdable value. For those fund managers still hesitating, following Zheng Zhiliang's footsteps is undoubtedly a wise move to reduce career risk.
Reeve Collins, on the other hand, operates with a different operating system. The Tether (USDT) he co-founded, despite ongoing controversies over reserve transparency and hefty fines from regulators, has not shaken its status as the unequivocal "underlying financial OS" of the crypto world. On most trading days, USDT's trading volume far exceeds the combined total of Bitcoin and Ethereum, forming the "settlement layer" of crypto trading. Where is the real market liquidity? What are the weak points in trading structures? How do the unspoken rules of the on-chain world operate? These are "beta version" insights that no external research report can provide.
Collins' value lies in his ability to navigate this fund, avoiding those invisible reefs. His subsequent projects, such as BLOCKv, also prove he is a crypto-native innovator continuously at the forefront of technology. This is the most exquisite aspect of this union. Zheng Zhiliang's "reputation firewall" perfectly hedges against the uncertainty risks in Collins' background, allowing the latter's deep "crypto-native OS" knowledge to be safely packaged and sold to the mainstream world. What they are building is no longer a simple asset portfolio, but an asset management company led by a top "product manager" (Collins) and a top "chief risk officer" (Zheng Zhiliang).
The art of shell companies: SPACs "weaponized"
In the showdown of top players, it’s not just about strategy, but also tactics. They did not choose a traditional IPO, nor did they start a new SPAC from scratch; instead, they directly "hijacked" an already listed "shell company"—M3-Brigade Acquisition V Corp. (MBAV), maximizing the efficiency of the SPAC financial tool.
A SPAC, or special purpose acquisition company, is essentially a publicly listed company with only cash and no actual business, whose sole purpose is to merge with a private company within a specified time (usually two years) to help the latter achieve "reverse listing." After the frenzy and bubble burst of 2021, the SPAC market in 2025 has returned to rationality, led by experienced "serial sponsors" like Zheng Zhiliang. They understand that for a crypto fund, speed is the lifeline. The traditional IPO process not only takes 6 to 12 months but also faces extremely strict and unpredictable scrutiny from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) when dealing with crypto businesses.
Zheng Zhiliang and Collins' operation is a textbook case of "weaponizing" SPACs. By acquiring sponsor equity, they directly gained control of the already listed company (MBAV). This series of operations flowed smoothly: acquisition, cleaning up the management team, renaming it CCRC Digital Assets Corp., and quickly pivoting from the originally planned energy sector straight into crypto assets. This means they completely bypassed the SPAC IPO process, almost achieving a "plug-and-play" public market trading seat. This allows them to launch the $1 billion fundraising at the fastest speed and complete capital deployment ahead of the market trend. This extreme pursuit of efficiency itself is a powerful competitive barrier.
Institutional investment's "Value Discovery 2.0"
If the 2024 spot Bitcoin ETF represents institutional completion of "Value Discovery 1.0" for crypto assets, then this fund aims for "Value Discovery 2.0"—expanding from a single "digital gold" to a value bet on the entire Web3 infrastructure ecosystem.
As BlackRock CEO Larry Fink stated, the future of the industry lies in broader "asset tokenization," not just Bitcoin. Ethereum, as the leader of smart contract platforms, is the cornerstone of decentralized finance (DeFi) and NFTs, representing the "application layer" of the next generation of the internet; Solana, with its high throughput and low transaction costs, shows great potential in high-frequency scenarios like payments and gaming, representing breakthroughs in the "performance layer." Investing in them shifts the bet from "digital value storage" to "the infrastructure of the next generation of the internet." Surveys from institutions like EY, Coinbase, and Fidelity also confirm that institutional investors' interest is rapidly expanding from Bitcoin to other "altcoins," DeFi, and tokenized assets.
Previously, institutions seeking diversified allocations mostly had to choose trust products like Grayscale's GDLC or Bitwise's BITW. However, these products traded in the over-the-counter (OTC) market have long faced issues of insufficient liquidity and significant discounts or premiums between price and net asset value (NAV), deterring many institutions seeking precise risk exposure.
CCRC Digital Assets Corp. offers a structural "upgrade." As a company that will be listed on the Nasdaq main board, its governance, information disclosure, and liquidity will benchmark against ordinary stocks. Shareholders have voting rights, the corporate governance structure is more transparent, and its stock price will fluctuate more closely around its net asset value, eliminating the discount and premium issues that plague trust products. More importantly, it is no longer a passive index-tracking trust but an actively managed company led by two industry giants. This means that during market volatility, it has the potential to flexibly adjust positions, actively hedge, and capture alpha returns—characteristics that passive ETFs lack and that institutional investors dream of.
Value discovery, because the structure is right
In the world of investment, the most astute hunters seek not undervalued prices, but overlooked structures. Prices may fluctuate, but a correct structure can continuously create value. This is the core value of the $1 billion giant ship that Zheng Zhiliang and Collins have jointly built.
Its disruptiveness does not lie in how much Bitcoin or Ethereum it holds, but in its unprecedented unique "structure":
Governance structure: The credibility endorsement of Wall Street legends + the native wisdom of crypto world creators. This addresses the two biggest pain points in investing in the crypto world: trust deficit and information asymmetry.
Capital structure: Rapid listing through SPAC, possessing high liquidity and transparency of the public market. This addresses the issues of poor exit channels and opaque valuations faced by traditional crypto funds.
Investment structure: Active management, capable of flexibly capturing the growth dividends of the entire crypto ecosystem (rather than just a single asset). This addresses the limitations of passive index funds that cannot respond to market upheavals or achieve excess returns.
This trinity structure allows CCRC Digital Assets Corp. to transcend the ordinary fund category. The current market may still be calculating the net asset value of the crypto assets this fund may hold. However, smarter investors have begun to examine its "platform value" as a listed asset management company. It resembles a "Berkshire Hathaway" of the crypto world—a holding platform led by top managers, aimed at long-term holding and managing optimal digital assets.
The story is just beginning. In an era where the regulatory environment is becoming clearer and institutional demand continues to surge, this "structurally correct" asset will undoubtedly become a key benchmark for assessing market maturity. Its birth and development will serve as a real-time "thermometer" for measuring institutional risk appetite under the new regulatory environment, potentially leading capital from the doorstep of the crypto world into the hall.
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