Hong Kong is open for business, and its exchange now includes spot Bitcoin and the world’s first spot Ethereum exchange-traded fund, which went live at 9:30 a.m. local time.

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According to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange’s website, Asia’s first spot crypto asset ETF is “trading” with 14 new funds listed.

Three ETF issuers have listed products under the ticker symbols CAM, BOS and HGI – China Asset Management, Bosera Asset Management and Harvest Global Investors.

Leading in Asia

“We can continue to move into physical spot assets, possibly composite products and eventually into leveraged and inverse strategies,” Brian Roberts, head of equities product development at HKEX, told Bloomberg.

The first step, he added, is to monitor how the latest launch develops and matures before considering other possibilities in the future.

ETF issuers believe that these products will be a big hit in the region. Zhu Haokang, head of digital asset management company China Asset Management, believes that Hong Kong’s listing day will be bigger than that of the United States. In a press release on April 29, he said:

“I am very confident that the initial listing size of the Hong Kong virtual asset spot ETF (over $125 million) will exceed the first-day issuance size in the United States.”

“Looking at the numbers, the trading volume is indeed much larger than the inflows on the first day of trading for the U.S. Bitcoin spot ETF,” Wayne Huang, head of custodian OSL ETF, commented on the first day of fundraising.

Cryptocurrency analyst Willy Woo noted that the Asian market has more users than the U.S. and European markets combined.

Meanwhile, PointVille founder Gabor Gurbacs said that the East-West Bitcoin ETF competition is heating up, and Hong Kong will not launch a crypto ETF without China’s approval.

As I have said many times, the East-West Bitcoin ETF race is heating up. No Bitcoin ETF will be launched in Hong Kong without China’s approval. China is determined to compete on institutional capabilities in Bitcoin. Full nation-state adoption of game theory. The game is on! — Gabor Gurbacs (@gaborgurbacs) April 29, 2024

“This is the first time we have a clear picture of ETH’s popularity relative to BTC in ETF form,” said ETF analyst Eric Balchunas.

Cryptocurrency market reaction

Bitcoin price hit an intraday high of $64,555 before publishing but retreated to $63,400 at the time of writing. The asset has been range-bound since late February.

Ethereum is the world's first spot ETF and has been the focus of attention since its launch. Ethereum hit an intraday high of $3,244, but also fell sharply at the time of its launch, falling to $3,148 before showing signs of recovery.

However, just an hour after the Hong Kong spot exchange launched, it is still too early to gauge its impact on the cryptocurrency market.