Our weekly news roundup from East Asia selects the most important developments in the industry.
Another cryptocurrency scandal in Hong Kong
Scammers posing as investment experts reportedly lured 145 victims into tipping $18.9 million to unlicensed Hong Kong cryptocurrency exchange Hounax.
According to reports earlier this week, police said investors were promised returns of up to 40% per annum with “no risk” in advertisements. Users were unable to withdraw funds after depositing them. On November 1, Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Exchange (SFC) said it had listed Hounax on a billboard for a suspicious cryptocurrency exchange, but that Hounax was not licensed at the time of the incident and therefore no action was taken by regulators.
This is the second scandal involving a cryptocurrency exchange in Hong Kong in recent months. In September, another unlicensed exchange, JPEX, collapsed after an alleged Ponzi scheme was uncovered, leading to 66 arrests and about $205 million in investor losses.
Despite these scandals, Hong Kong regulators appear determined to transform the city into a major Web3 hub. SFC CEO Leung explained on the 27th, “Even if the grace period ends tomorrow, fraud may continue to occur, so we have no intention of modifying the grace period or other measures for the time being.”
Under current regulations, the grace period for cryptocurrency exchanges to operate without registration ends in June 2024. On November 30, the SFC said it was seeking to legalize ICOs in the city to generate more revenue for the state budget.
In other cryptocurrency news from Hong Kong, financial institutions Interactive Brokers and Victory Securities announced this week that they have secured cryptocurrency licenses. The former has partnered with cryptocurrency exchange OSL to provide Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) trading services out of the box. Hong Kong customer.
And on November 29, Darryl Chan, Deputy Director of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, announced a multinational effort to create a cross-chain bridge for China’s digital yuan central bank digital currency (e-CNY CBDC). The protocol, called “mBridge”, aims to reduce transaction fees and improve the speed of cross-border use of the e-CNY CBDC. The first pilot tests will begin in mainland China and Hong Kong.
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Foreign banks participate in e-CNY pilot test
Standard Chartered, HSBC, Hang Seng Bank and Taiwan-based Fubon Bank have begun testing the digital yuan in cross-border transactions.
According to a local news report on November 28, four foreign banks also plan to integrate e-CNY transfer services for customers and allow customers to deposit and withdraw e-CNY. Personal bank accounts also support the official e-CNY app and self-custodial wallet. Yuesheng Song, President and Vice Chairman of Hang Seng China, commented:
“The central bank’s launch of digital RMB, a digital form of fiat currency, is an important step for China to explore the development of digital currency and promote the internationalization of RMB. Hang Seng China follows the advocacy of the national financial development policy and actively supports the application and development of central bank digital currency.”
In the first three quarters of 2023, the use of the digital yuan in transactions rose 35% year-on-year to reach $1.39 trillion, China Daily reported. On November 29, the first e-CNY student loan was issued in Suzhou province, with loans worth $26,230 issued directly to the digital wallets of 13 recipients.
HTX is back to normal.
HTX Exchange (formerly Huobi Global) resumed deposits and withdrawals following a massive hot wallet hacking incident on November 22 that leaked $30 million in exchange funds.
According to an announcement on November 26, the exchange has since resumed deposits and withdrawals on the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tron networks.
“Huobi HTX once again pledges to fully compensate for the losses caused by this attack and ensure the 100% safety of user funds. “The amount of funds lost by Huobi HTX this time is a very small amount of the total funds on the platform,” the exchange said.
The company also announced that a special airdrop will be taking place in December to reward “loyal users.” The airdrop tokens will reportedly come from “future high-quality projects,” and the amount received will be determined by the average net worth of users on the HTX exchange, denominated in Tether (USDT).
Immediately after the incident, Justin Sun, founder of the Tron ecosystem and de facto owner of the HTX exchange, said, “We will compensate for the losses and all assets are safe.” However, despite these assurances, this was the fourth attack involving the HTX ecosystem in the past two months. Almost simultaneously with the HTX exploit, the HTX Ecosystem Chain (HECO) bridge was hacked for $87 million.
On November 10, Poloniex, an exchange acquired by Sun in 2018, was hacked for $100 million with private keys allegedly leaked. The exchange resumed withdrawals on November 30th. On September 25, HTX suffered a loss of $8 million due to a security incident. The exchange subsequently recovered $8 million in stolen funds and paid a 250 Ether bounty to the hacker.
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Jiyuan Line
Zhiyuan Sun is a journalist at Cointelegraph specializing in technology news. He has years of experience writing for major financial outlets such as The Motley Fool, Nasdaq.com, and Seeking Alpha.