No civil protection for crypto in China, $300K to list coins in Hong Kong? Asia Express – Cointelegraph Magazine

East Asia's weekly news roundup reviews the industry's most important developments.

Hot week for Hong Kong exchanges

Hashkey Exchange – one of the first regulated crypto exchanges in Hong Kong – has announced insurance coverage for customers who store in hot and cold wallets. Accounts. The policy covers 50% of Hashkey's digital assets in cold wallets and 100% of digital assets in hot wallets and pays anywhere between $50 million to $400 million in the event of a claim.

Hashkey's partnership with fintech OneDegree will jointly develop a pair of novel crypto security solutions for the exchange to handle server outages, data backups and load control. “Obtaining insurance coverage from OneInfinity through OneDegree meets the requirements of the Securities and Futures Commission. We believe the partnership will enhance our financial, technical and service infrastructure to provide comprehensive protection to our customers,” said Livio Wang, COO of Hashkey Group. .

Wang also revealed that the exchange plans to submit four major altcoins to the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission for listing. Since the license was approved in August, Hashkey has served more than 120,000 customers with a cumulative transaction volume exceeding $10 billion.

BC Technology Group, another licensed exchange owner called OSL, has announced a $91 million strategic investment from BGX crypto group. Patrick Pan, CEO of BGX, called the investment “a strategic move that reflects our belief in the high potential of the digital asset market.” Last month, Bloomberg reported that BC Technology Group was looking to spin off the OSL exchange for $128 million, which the company denied at the time.

While Hong Kong's crypto exchanges are strengthening, the barrier to entry for users and token developers seems high. Hashkey announced on November 15 that token developers must pay a non-refundable $10,000 application fee to list their coins or tokens on an exchange.

Hashkey also warned that developers should expect to spend between $50,000 and $300,000 for the listing process when combined with due diligence or consulting fees.

The ban gets a new start

Crypto media publication The Block has received a $60 million investment from Singaporean venture capital firm Foresight Ventures for 80% of its equity, but will still operate as a separate company.

CEO Larry Cermak said on Nov. 13 that the deal “gives us a fresh start ahead of the bull market and additional capital to build new exciting products and expand our footprint into Asia and the Middle East.”

“The acquisition of Block is an important milestone, significantly strengthening Foresight Ventures' position in the cryptocurrency sector,” Forrest Bye, CEO of Foresight Ventures, told Cointelegraph.

The ban was embroiled in the FTX scandal last year, when former CEO Mike McCaffrey took out millions of dollars in loans from FTX's founder and convicted criminal Sam Bankman-Fried. Most of the capital was used to buy back the stock. Block is said to have laid off 33% of its workforce due to the overall market downturn and the fallout from the crisis.

There is no civil protection for crypto in China.

A third Chinese court has rejected a crypto investment contract, saying cryptocurrencies are against the spirit of the crypto ban and are not protected by law, at least in civil disputes.

According to the Liaoning Xuanhe People's Court on November 14, the plaintiff, Wang Ping, lent the equivalent of 552,300 Tether (USDT) to his friend Zhao Bin to invest in altcoins in 2022. The transaction resulted in significant losses. For Wang, he will then file a lawsuit demanding the return of the principal. Defendant Zhao refused.

At the hearing, the presiding judge ruled that the plaintiff was not entitled to injunctive relief because transactions between cryptocurrencies were classified as an “illegal activity.” Therefore, all “virtual currency and related derivatives violate public order and good customs, and relevant civil legal actions are invalid, and the resulting losses are covered by them.”

“Virtual currency does not have the same legal status as fiat currency. Business activities related to virtual currency are illegal financial activities. In addition, it is an illegal financial activity to provide virtual currency exchanges abroad to residents of my country over the Internet.

The ruling follows other precedents set by China's civil courts earlier this year. However, recently, the Chinese government made it clear that some criminal activities related to virtual currencies, such as the theft of Invulnerable Tokens, can be prosecuted under the Criminal Code. Chinese has implemented its crypto ban since 2021.

Philippines to issue tokenized bonds

The Philippine Bureau of the Treasury (BTr) is seeking to raise up to $180 million through the issuance of tokenized bonds from the domestic capital market.

In the year As announced on November 16, token bonds are one-year fixed-rate government securities that pay semi-annual coupons and will be offered to institutional investors starting next week. The bonds will be issued in the form of digital tokens and stored in BTr's Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) ledger. “As part of the National Government's Government Securities Digitization Roadmap, the first edition of TTB aims to provide a proof of concept for the widespread use of DLT in the government bond market,” the institute said.

In July, Cointelegraph reported that the non-profit Philippine Blockchain Council partnered with the Department of Information and Communication Technology (DICT) to boost Web3 adoption in the Southeast Asian country. The organizations work to educate and collaborate with local stakeholders in the Philippine blockchain ecosystem, including government bodies, Web3 developers and civil society.

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Zhiyuan Sun

Zhyuan Sun is a reporter at Cointelegraph, focusing on technology-related news. He has several years of experience writing for major financial media outlets such as The Motley Fool, Nasdaq.com and Seeking Alpha.