Why this crypto exchange chose to bow out of the Hong Kong market

Jour­nal­ist

Post­ed: Novem­ber 15, 2023

• The deci­sion was made cit­ing “busi­ness and mar­ket-relat­ed considerations.”
• Rumors of Bit­get acquir­ing or invest­ing in OSL were doing the rounds in the market.

Cryp­tocur­ren­cy exchange Bit­get decid­ed against apply­ing for a Vir­tu­al Asset Trad­ing Plat­form (VATP) license in Hong Kong. This license is a manda­to­ry require­ment for firms look­ing to offer cryp­to trad­ing in the region.

Thus, Bit­get will cease oper­a­tions of its Hong Kong arm, Bit­getX, start­ing on the 13th of Decem­ber, and exit the Hong Kong mar­ket, the offi­cial announce­ment read.

Bitget shuts down operations in Hong Kong

Bit­get urged all Bit­getX users to with­draw their cryp­to funds with­in the dead­line, or they would be locked out. More­over, trad­ing would remain sus­pend­ed on the plat­form and only with­drawals would be allowed.

Bit­get also said that it would not accept new users on the plat­form going forward.

The Sey­chelles-head­quar­tered com­pa­ny attrib­uted the deci­sion to “busi­ness and mar­ket-relat­ed considerations.”

Bitget’s exit comes amidst the rush of cryp­to com­pa­nies to get licensed in the spe­cial admin­is­tra­tive region, fol­low­ing the new­ly for­mu­lat­ed reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work for dig­i­tal asset trad­ing plat­forms.

Pre­vi­ous­ly restrict­ed to insti­tu­tion­al investors, the new guide­lines allowed trad­ing plat­forms to serve the pub­lic as well.

Are the rumors true?

As of this writ­ing, just two plat­forms, OSL and HashKey, were grant­ed per­mis­sion to oper­ate, accord­ing to offi­cial data.

Inter­est­ing­ly, rumors of Bit­get acquir­ing or invest­ing in OSL were doing the rounds in the mar­ket. How­ev­er, there was no sol­id evi­dence at press time to sup­port the speculations.

Bit­get was the four­teenth-largest cryp­to exchange glob­al­ly in the last 24 hours, clock­ing spot vol­umes of $1.2 bil­lion, as per CoinGecko.

The exchange was recent­ly in the news due to a dis­pute with the meme coin project Flo­ki [FLOKI]. The con­tro­ver­sy revolved around the list­ing of Floki’s sis­ter project, TOKEN, with both par­ties lev­el­ing seri­ous alle­ga­tions against each other.