Hong Kong is on track to announce the conclusion of its consultation on its new push to allow retail crypto investors to trade crypto. According to a Bloomberg report, the briefing through which the Securities and Financial Commission (SFC) will announce this new regime under a different rulebook that offers the right safeguards to protect investors will come as early as today.
Hong Kong was once a major crypto hub, where most major platforms started out before venturing out into other markets. Stringent rules that only allowed institutional investors with not less than $1 million in capital to trade crypto proved unsustainable to capture the fast evolving ecosystem.
To correct this anomaly and return the island to its glory days, the SFC is now making allowances for retail investors to trade Bitcoin (BTC) and other big tokens. While talks about this permission have been ongoing for a while now, the Bloomberg report shows the final go ahead is about to be granted.
As part of the necessary safeguards to grant this permission is the rollout of a licensing regime for Virtual Assets Service Providers (VASPs) starting on June 1.
Boost for crypto world
Crypto industry leaders have often been optimistic about the potential of digital currencies to revolutionize the broader financial industry. Their optimism has largely been limited by regulatory strain in different countries.
The evolution of the industry can help it thrive provided there is functional regulation in place. The move by the Hong Kong SFC may help to set a very good precedent in the nascent ecosystem that other regulators may choose to follow.
The confluence of these positive regulatory allowances to trade crypto will have a broader and defined growth upside for the industry, with a major effect on the prices of the supported digital assets, which have projections for growth already.