$BTC $SOL $PEPE
You might see a scene like this at a street corner in Wan Chai or Causeway Bay, Hong Kong: a shop that looks like a bank counter, with the words "Digital Asset Exchange" written on the wall. You can walk in to exchange for USDT, withdraw BTC, or even have a bunch of stablecoins deposited into your local bank account in Hong Kong. You might wonder what this has to do with compliant exchanges? Ironically, many of these places that seem like "street-side exchange shops" are strategic partners of compliant licensed platforms, which makes one start to ponder: the on-site operations are exchanges, while the off-site dealings are OTC, is this the dual cultivation version of Hong Kong's Web3 entrepreneurs? If this situation were presented two years ago, it would have been quite surprising. After all, in traditional understanding, once you obtain a license, shouldn't you be running a matching engine, connecting clearing and settlement, and maintaining a compliance system? Now, instead, they are all going down to do "currency exchange"? It sounds a bit like a dimensionality reduction attack. But if you really look into the current profit status of compliant exchanges in Hong Kong and examine the current state of capital flow between the mainland and Hong Kong, this arrangement actually makes perfect sense, and one could even say it is inevitable.
