Hong Kong Pushes for More Cryptocurrency Trading Regulation

Hong Kong will manage all digital currency exchanging stages working in the money related center, the city’s business sectors guard dog said, changing its past “pick in” approach. 

Monetary controllers around the globe are as yet evaluating whether and how they ought to direct the cryptographic money industry. Speculator security and forestalling illegal tax avoidance are specific concerns. 

Other money related focuses in Asia, for example, Japan and Singapore have permitting systems which require all digital currency exchanging stages to be managed. 

Conversely, while Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) dispatched an administrative structure explicitly for cryptographic money exchanging stages a year ago, this was confined to those stages that exchanged a resource authoritatively classed as a security or future, not simply tokens like bitcoin. 

“This is a significant limitation, as under the current legislative framework if a platform operator is really determined to operate completely off the regulatory radar it can do so simply by ensuring that its traded crypto assets are not within the legal definition of a security,” Ashley Alder, CEO of the SFC, said in a discourse. 

Thusly, the Hong Kong government, today, will propose another authorizing system today under its enemy of illegal tax avoidance enactment, requiring all digital currency exchanging stages that work there, or target speculators in the city, to apply for a SFC permit, Alder said.

The Hong Kong regulator drafted a legal framework for cryptocurrency platforms last year. However, these regulations only  covered platforms that served over a digital asset “legally classified as a security.”

This was not enough to regulate cryptocurrency platforms. Alder touched on this issue at Fintech Week and said, 

“A cryptocurrency platform that did not want to be caught on our radar was buying and selling cryptocurrencies that were not legally defined as ‘securities’ and was not caught.” 

Get the latest in Asian Bitcoin news here at Coin News Asia.