Today, during one of the biggest tech events in the region, Hong Kong Fintech Week, the HKSAR government announced that it would boost the virtual asset adoption and development in the city with the help of regulators.
“Similar to the development and adoption of other technologies that came before, pathway to the above vision may not be straightforward as it involves considerable risks in uncharted waters. We will adopt the “same activity, same risks, same regulation” principle, and put in place timely and necessary guardrails, so that VA innovations can thrive in Hong Kong in a sustainable manner”
One of the key areas to focus the development of the ecosystem are stablecoins, which are “seen to have a growing potential for significant interconnectedness with the traditional financial markets e.g. in the payment system.”
Other aspects of the VA adoption include NFTs issuance, bond tokenisation, and e-HKD aka Hong Kong’s own CBDC,
The Hong Kong securities and futures regulator also made a statement on the same day that it would consider authorizing exchange traded funds (ETFs) with digital currencies and assets as their underlying assets.
“Hong Kong shows signs of a vibrant VA ecosystem, as demonstrated by NFT issuance in our market, presence of Metaverse developers, and use of DLT in trade finance etc,” said the policy statement. “Further opportunities can be realised if we cast our sight further on more use cases, e.g. trading arts and collectibles, tokenising vintage goods, or in the case of financial innovations, tokenising a wide spectrum of products such as debt securities.”