The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) has introduced a new roadmap aimed at positioning the city as a global cryptocurrency hub.
On Feb. 19, the SEC announced the “ASPIRe” roadmap in hopes of future-proofing Hong Kong’s virtual asset ecosystem.
It responds to challenges such as fragmented liquidity, regulatory arbitrage and market volatility while fostering innovation through a five-pillar strategy: access, safeguards, products, infrastructure and relationships.
Hong Kong SFC’s A-S-P-I-Re roadmap for crypto assets. Source: Hong Kong SFC
The new roadmap involves 12 initiatives spread across five broad categories, which include providing market access, optimizing compliance and frameworks and improving blockchain efficiency.
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The “Access” pillar calls for streamlining market entry, “Safeguards” deals with enhancing compliance without stifling growth, and “Products” focuses on expanding virtual asset offerings. The SFC stated:
“This embodies a pragmatic approach to solidify Hong Kong’s role as a trusted nexus for virtual asset liquidity.”
The other two pillars — “Infrastructure” and “Relationships” — are dedicated to strengthening oversight and compliance and education, engagement and transparency, respectively.
Taking notice of interest from institutional investors
The SFC also noted the increasing dominance of institutional investors globally that are contributing to the crypto market capitalization. However, regulatory disparities between major financial hubs such as Singapore, Europe, the United States and China present challenges for compliance and market stability.
The increased institutional adoption is further blurring the lines between crypto and traditional finance (TradFi), according to the SFC:
“This convergence presents dual opportunities: applying TradFi’s compliance rigor to virtual assets and leveraging blockchain-driven innovations to modernize TradFi.”
Calls for updating rules to accommodate crypto innovation
The SFC also advised regulators to show agility in “updating legacy rules” to accommodate tokenized securities and other hybrid models while ensuring core regulatory adherence to innovations in smart contracts and decentralized platforms.
Parallel to the SFC announcement, Hong Kong’s financial secretary, Paul Chan Mo-po, assured Hong Kong would “remain a stable, open and vibrant market for digital assets” in a keynote address at Consensus 2025.
He also said that the region is investing heavily in virtual asset-related infrastructure and talent development.
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