All eyes on bitcoin at Web3 gathering
Hong Kong’s biggest annual Web3 gathering concluded on Tuesday with industry executives looking to capitalise on the ballooning bitcoin price ahead of what is expected to be the city’s imminent approval of spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for the virtual asset this month.
Industry leaders attending the Hong Kong Web3 Festival shared extremely optimistic projections of the world’s largest cryptocurrency token, whose price is up by 58 per cent to about US$69,000 this year, as the cryptocurrency faithful hope to extend the winning streak.
On the opening day of the event on Saturday, American investor Cathie Wood made the bold prediction that the price of bitcoin was headed to US$1.5 million by 2030. Mao Shixing, co-founder and CEO of cryptocurrency custody and wallet provider Cobo, who uses the name Discus Fish in English, said he thought even the prediction of a 2,000 per cent increase in the next six years was “conservative”.
While the conference touched on a range of topics, including real-world asset tokenisation and artificial intelligence, “bitcoin and its ecosystem projects” clearly took “centre stage” at the event, said Lily Z. King, chief operating officer of Cobo.
The excitement also partially stems from the active development of so-called layer 2 bitcoin projects, which are networks that run alongside the main blockchain to help it scale through faster transactions.
Many cryptocurrency firms see this as an opportunity to boost demand for businesses built around bitcoin.
Spot ETFs are driving the most excitement, though, as they will give investors an easy way to expose themselves to bitcoin without needing to worry about managing cryptocurrency keys and storage.
Multiple people attending the event said they expected the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) to give the go-ahead for spot bitcoin ETFs this month following the approval of such funds in the United States in January.
Tencent News reported the first batch could be announced as soon as April 15, with mainland fund managers Harvest International and China Asset Management among the issuers.
The SFC recently approved Harvest and China Asset Management to manage portfolios that invest more than 10 per cent in virtual assets, according to the regulator’s website.
Hong Kong regulators said in December the city was prepared to allow retail access to ETFs that invested directly into cryptocurrencies and would start to authorise funds that offered such products.
Apart from traditional investors, Hong Kong’s bitcoin spot ETFs would be attractive to “crypto native players” because the city’s regulatory regime was currently the only one in the world that allowed in-kind subscriptions, said Marco Lim, managing partner at cryptocurrency hedge fund MaiCapital.