Retail cryptocurrency investors in Hong Kong have expanded investment options with the approval of the listing of the Avalanche and Chainlink coins on Hashkey, one of only two fully licensed exchanges in the jurisdiction. Until now, retail offerings in Hong Kong were limited to Bitcoin and Ether.

Professional investors — individuals with a portfolio worth at least 8 million Hong Kong dollars (slightly more than $1 million) or representatives of financial institutions — have a much wider selection of cryptocurrencies to choose from.

Tokens free of legal conflict

Avalanche (AVAX) and Chainlink (LINK) are available to retail on Hashkey for trading against the US dollar. HashKey CEO Livio Weng told the South China Morning Post that those coins were chosen for listing because there are no legal conflicts surrounding them, unlike many cryptocurrencies with larger market caps.

AVAX is the native coin of the Avalanche network. It has a market cap of $9.3 billion, giving it a rank of 13th largest, according to the Cointelegraph price index. LINK, the coin of the Chainlink oracle network, ranks 16th at $6.9 billion. Weng commented:

“This implies that Hong Kong will speed up in the area of Web3. There may be many reasons for this acceleration, but the main catalyst may have been particularly when Trump expressed his intention to have Web3 happen in the United States.”

Weng added that the exchange could receive approval for the retail listing of more cryptocurrencies “within weeks.”

Limited number of exchanges in Hong Kong

Hong Kong began allowing retail crypto trading in August 2023, when Hashkey and OSL, Hong Kong’s other fully compliant crypto exchange, upgraded its licensing. Other exchanges operate under a “deemed to be licensed” status. The Hong Kong Securities & Futures Commission (SFC) ordered exchanges without that status or a license to close down by June 1.

Source: Hashkey Exchange

 The SFC stopped accepting virtual asset trading platform license applications at the end of February. Since then, at least 13 exchanges have withdrawn their applications.

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