Hong Kong regulators signaled a decisive shift toward deeper global integration of digital-asset markets, outlining a regulatory evolution that moves beyond closed-loop systems and toward direct access to international liquidity.

Speaking across multiple sessions at the Finternet 2025 Asia Digital Finance Summit, senior officials from the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) described how Hong Kong’s cautious regulatory architecture, established in 2018, had delivered safety and credibility but increasingly constrained the city’s ability to participate in global price discovery.

This assessment underpinned a key policy announcement on November 3, when the SFC introduced rules allowing licensed virtual-asset trading platforms to share their order books with affiliated overseas venues.

The change will enable Hong Kong investors to tap into deeper international liquidity pools, reducing fragmentation and bringing local market pricing closer to global benchmarks.

Regulators emphasized that the shift followed extensive industry consultation designed to ensure platforms could operate with clear guardrails and remain compliant with traditional-finance expectations.

Officials also described how Hong Kong’s licensing framework has matured through years of iterative development.

Early licensees, including the first approved virtual-asset trading platform, required long engagement as regulators built their understanding of crypto-native business models and reconciled them with established norms governing custody, transparency and investor protection.

The SFC now intends to expand its regime to cover brokers, custodians, advisory services and fund managers, creating a complete regulatory perimeter for the digital-asset ecosystem.

Comparative insights from Abu Dhabi Global Market highlighted a similar trajectory toward convergence between digital assets and traditional finance.

Both jurisdictions are shaping regulatory standards around market integrity, asset segregation and cross-border consistency, reflecting the growing role of global coordination.

Industry participants noted that the harmonization of frameworks across Hong Kong, Singapore and the UAE is already lowering operational barriers for firms seeking multi-jurisdictional expansion.

Hong Kong regulators acknowledged that tokenization remains in an early phase, with limited commercial deployment despite clear legal frameworks.

To accelerate progress, the SFC plans an innovation initiative aimed at catalyzing market-driven use cases across tokenized securities and digital-asset structures.

At the same time, cross-border interoperability remains a priority.

The SFC and ADGM both described efforts to integrate supervisory technologies capable of real-time monitoring, machine-readable rules and stronger linkages between on-chain activity and regulatory oversight.

Regulators said the next stage of Hong Kong’s digital-asset development will focus on derivatives, staking, lending and structured financing products, provided market participants demonstrate readiness and professional standards.

They stressed that the city aims to advance quickly but responsibly, adapting regulation through incremental, iterative steps rather than rigid perfectionism.

With new liquidity-sharing rules in place and consultations underway on broader licensing regimes, Hong Kong is positioning itself for a more open, globally connected era in digital-asset finance.