Retail crypto investors in Hong Kong have expanded their investment options with the listing of Avalanche and Chainlink coins on Hashkey, one of two fully licensed exchanges in the jurisdiction. Until now, retail products in Hong Kong have been limited to Bitcoin and Ether.
Professional investors (individuals or financial institution representatives with a portfolio value of more than HK$8 million (US$1 million or more) have a much wider range of cryptocurrencies to choose from.
Tokens without legal conflicts
Avalanche (AVAX) and Chainlink (LINK) are now available for trading on Hashkey for USD. HashKey CEO Livio Weng told the South China Morning Post that these coins were chosen for listing because they do not have any legal conflicts, unlike many cryptocurrencies with large market caps.
AVAX is the native coin of the Avalanche network. It has a market cap of $9.3 billion, ranking 13th according to the Cointelegraph price index. LINK, the coin of the Chainlink oracle network, ranks 16th with $6.9 billion. Weng said:
“This means that Hong Kong will be accelerating in the Web3 space. There may be several reasons for this acceleration, but the main catalyst may have been when Trump announced his intention to implement Web3 in the United States.”
Weng added that the exchange could receive retail listing approval for more cryptocurrencies “in the coming weeks.”
Limited number of exchanges in Hong Kong
Hong Kong began allowing retail crypto trading in August 2023, when Hashkey and OSL, the other fully compliant crypto exchange in Hong Kong, upgraded their licenses. Other exchanges operate under “deemed-as-licensed” status. The Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) of Hong Kong has ordered exchanges without that status or license to close by June 1.
source: Hashkey Exchange
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The SFC stopped accepting applications for virtual asset trading platform licenses in late February. Since then, at least 13 exchanges have withdrawn their applications.
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