Hong Kong’s Regulatory Shift Triggers Bitcoin Price Pump

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BTC saw a mod­est bump fol­low­ing the news that Hong Kong will be relax­ing cryp­to trad­ing. How­ev­er, so far, the OG cryp­tocur­ren­cy looks set for a less-than-excit­ing May. From a reg­u­la­to­ry stand­point, Hong Kong is still a tough juris­dic­tion for cryp­to in many ways. Part­ly as a result of pres­sure from main­land China. 

Bit­coin’s price has pumped in reac­tion to the news that Hong Kong is tak­ing a pro-cryp­to direc­tion, accord­ing to a CNBC report. On Tues­day, Hong Kong’s Secu­ri­ties and Futures Com­mis­sion announced it will allow retail trad­ing of some cryp­to assets from June 1.

Hong Kong Drives Rally

BTC pumped from around $26,800 at 1:10 a.m. UTC to $27,384 just over two hours lat­er. An increase of over 2%, accord­ing to Coin­Mar­ket­Cap. Bit­coin has been strug­gling to break the $27,000 mark since last Thursday.

The world’s old­est cryp­tocur­ren­cy has fol­lowed neg­a­tive trends for most of May. Although it is still well above the rough­ly $16,500 it entered the year with. 

Bit­coin also did not see a much-antic­i­pat­ed “Piz­za Dayspike. Piz­za Day cel­e­brates the year­ly anniver­sary of the first ever real-world trans­ac­tion using Bit­coin, where 10,000 units were exchanged for two piz­zas on May 22, 2010.

Yet Bit­coin is still see­ing a pro­longed peri­od of dom­i­nance com­pared to oth­er cryp­tocur­ren­cies, sit­ting above 45% since the begin­ning of March.

Bit­coin price on May 23. Source: Coin­Mar­ket­Cap

Bitcoin Approved for Retail Investing

Hong Kong has just fin­ished a con­sul­ta­tion peri­od regard­ing the pol­i­cy where they had received 152 writ­ten submissions. 

“A sig­nif­i­cant major­i­ty of respon­dents agreed to our pro­pos­al to allow licensed trad­ing plat­form oper­a­tors to serve retail investors,” read an offi­cial state­ment

The reg­u­la­tor invit­ed cryp­to firms to reg­is­ter with them, but stressed those that wouldn’t should “pro­ceed to an order­ly clo­sure of their busi­ness in Hong Kong.”

The announce­ment also empha­sized that the SFC has not approved any vir­tu­al asset trad­ing plat­form. It also made clear that most avail­able trad­ing ser­vices are not reg­u­lat­ed by the SFC. Exchanges in Hong Kong can also only list a small num­ber of dig­i­tal assets.

Hong Kong Still Strict on Crypto

The Chi­nese city has a his­to­ry as a finan­cial hub going back decades. Although, its approach to dig­i­tal assets has been more cau­tious. No doubt influ­enced by the gov­ern­ment of the Chi­nese main­land, which has tak­en a very hard line against the sector.

On May 9, Hong Kong Mon­e­tary Author­i­ty Chief Exec­u­tive Eddie Yue said that reg­u­la­tions “will be tight.” 

“We will let them cre­ate the ecosys­tem here, and that actu­al­ly brings a lot of excite­ment. But that doesn’t mean light-touch reg­u­la­tion,” he told the Bloomberg Wealth Asia Summit.

Disclaimer

In adher­ence to the Trust Project guide­lines, BeIn­Cryp­to is com­mit­ted to unbi­ased, trans­par­ent report­ing. This news arti­cle aims to pro­vide accu­rate, time­ly infor­ma­tion. How­ev­er, read­ers are advised to ver­i­fy facts inde­pen­dent­ly and con­sult with a pro­fes­sion­al before mak­ing any deci­sions based on this content.

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