Yesterday, the two-day 17th Asian Financial Forum opened in Hong Kong.
Aims to gather professional forces to seek opportunities in China.
Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee said in his speech at the forum,
“One country, two systems” brings long-term opportunities to Hong Kong’s financial industry, allowing it to thrive even in the face of severe challenges. Hong Kong will continue to serve as a “super connector” and “super value adder” to create opportunities for businesses and economies in Asia and around the world.
As a key strategic focus of Hong Kong’s future, how to further promote and implement the Web3 concept in Hong Kong has attracted a lot of discussion and attention.
At the forum, Livio, CEO of Hashkey Exchange, the largest licensed digital asset exchange in Hong Kong, expressed his views.
He believes that the digital asset industry will enter the fast lane in 24-25 years, and there are three major trends that deserve the industry's continued attention.
Trend 1: Traditional finance will be fully integrated with Web3, and new asset types will appear in the market.
Earlier this month, the US SEC approved 11 Bitcoin spot ETFs for the first time.
This is a milestone for the blockchain industry, marking the beginning of traditional finance’s full embrace of Web3.
As an investment method that is more familiar to the general public, Bitcoin spot ETF has greatly accelerated the pace of the general public entering Web3.
Behind this is a huge scale of users and funds.
The SEC's actions have a strong driving effect on major global financial markets, and the Hong Kong Bitcoin ETF is also eager to try.
As the largest licensed exchange in Hong Kong, HashKey will become the infrastructure provider for Hong Kong Bitcoin ETF.
Livio said that he had recently received cooperation invitations from many traditional financial institutions. Hashkey will provide partners with digital asset trading, clearing and settlement, custody and other services to lead the institutional application for Hong Kong SPOT ETF.
Currently Hashkey is actively communicating with its partners and SFC, hoping to implement it in the first half of the year.
Once the Bitcoin ETF is launched, it will bring new investment assets to the market.
Trend 2: The maturity of Web3 industry infrastructure makes blockchain truly usable
Web3 is a new industry that continues to develop, but there is no killer application that affects everyone.
The biggest gap is that the infrastructure is not yet perfect.
However, this industry is developing very rapidly, and the blockchain infrastructure will gradually mature in the next two years.
First of all, Bitcoin will be halved this year, and the reduction in the unit supply of Bitcoin will make the total circulation more stable.
Secondly, ETH is about to usher in the Cancun upgrade. With the improvement of layer2, Ethereum's TPS will reach 30,000.
This performance improvement is very similar to the Internet in the 1990s. The progress of Web3 from concept to implementation will become more and more intense.
Finally, with the continued development of on-chain DeFi and Gamefi, these application innovations continue to spawn new assets, and the next two years are bound to usher in a magnificent application bull market.
Trend 3: Global comprehensive compliance policy changes drive incremental crowds and capital into the market
The development of Web3 over the past decade has been accompanied by threats and disruptions from various market manipulation, fraud, money laundering and other behaviors.
As the industry has developed to this day, moving towards compliance has become an industry consensus.
Compliance can create a trusted, manipulation-free marketplace for users.
As an important financial center in the world, Hong Kong has done a lot of exploration in Web3 compliance in the past two years.
Hashkey can be said to be the representative of the implementation of Web3 compliance in Hong Kong.
Under the SFC's compliance and regulatory framework, Hashkey Exchange's assets are safer and digital currency deposits and withdrawals are smoother.
Therefore, retail investors who are sensitive to compliance have recently begun to enter the market.
According to Hashkey’s recent data, a total of HK$320 billion in transactions have been completed, user assets have increased 7.5 times in recent months, and daily active users have increased 12 times.
Next, driven by SPOT ETF, Omnibus and others, traditional funds, family offices and pension funds will enter the market, which will continue to attract incremental people and funds.
As Hashkey has been running stably for nearly half a year, Livio revealed that Hashkey will achieve positive cash flow in January.
This is the first time that Hashkey has achieved positive monthly cash flow since it obtained a license in 2022, and it is expected to achieve a 3-6 times growth this year.
The success of Hashkey, to some extent, also represents the completion of stage 1 (exploration) of Hong Kong’s web3 industry construction.
Next, we can move on to stage 2 and quickly implement various innovations.
As for further development suggestions in the future, Livio believes that Hong Kong needs to embrace the characteristics of global users to a greater extent in order to build a web3 center.
Now many overseas customers want to open an account at hashkey, but are unable to do so due to restrictions on bank card authentication.
At the same time, there are currently only two coins available to retail investors on licensed exchanges in Hong Kong, which is too unattractive.
In the future, it is recommended to accelerate the exploration and implementation of RWA and STO to launch differentiated assets in Hong Kong that are different from other markets.
Livio also suggested enriching exchange products, such as introducing low-risk leverage tools to allow institutions and PIs to achieve hedging, cross-market arbitrage, etc.
Livio said that if Hong Kong wants to embrace Web3, it must adapt to changes while being safe and stable.
This is very difficult, but Hashkey is willing to continue to explore this balance with SFC to seek sustainable, healthy and safe development.
In 2024, everything is just beginning.
This year, with the full integration of traditional finance and Web3, the maturity of infrastructure, and the implementation of compliance, the industry will still have a period of rapid development of about 10 years.
This will bring about a profound change to the global financial industry and is also a historical opportunity that Hong Kong must seize!
