September 4th, 2023

Is There a Need for a Third Exchange License in Hong Kong?

The Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) of Hong Kong is indeed committed to developing a digital asset center in Hong Kong. The SFC’s proactive approach towards regulating and embracing digital assets is a significant step towards enhancing Hong Kong’s role as a major financial hub. By providing clear regulatory guidelines and granting licenses to digital asset exchanges, the SFC is fostering a secure and regulated environment for digital asset trading. This not only attracts more institutional investors to the digital asset market but also strengthens investor confidence in digital assets. The SFC’s initiatives are expected to further promote the growth and development of the digital asset industry in Hong Kong.

The SFC’s decision to embrace crypto trading has enabled more licensed players in the Hong Kong scene. The recent approval of the Hong Kong Virtual Asset Exchange (HKVAX) as the third licensed crypto exchange in Hong Kong marks a significant step in Hong Kong’s evolving crypto landscape. The journey to establish Hong Kong as a robust crypto and digital asset hub has been met with challenges, but the emergence of new players like HKVAX raises questions about the need for a third exchange license and the potential financial viability of another player in the market.

Overview of the current exchanges

HashKey Exchange is Hong Kong’s first licensed retail virtual asset exchange. It provides a safe and reliable crypto trading platform for BTC, ETH, and other cryptocurrencies. HashKey Exchange is licensed by the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong (SFC) with Type 1 (Dealing in securities) license & Type 7 (Providing automated trading services) license. It also holds a TCSP license (Certification No. TC006486).

OSL is a digital asset platform that provides regulated solutions for institutions, corporates, and professional investors. They are also granted Type 1 & 7 digital asset licenses by the SFC in Hong Kong. On August 3, 2023, OSL received an SFC license uplift, enabling retail investors to trade Bitcoin and Ethereum.

On the one hand, it could be argued that the existing two exchanges, HashKey Exchange and OSL, are already meeting the demand for crypto trading services in Hong Kong. These exchanges offer a wide range of features and services, including spot trading, margin trading, and derivatives trading. They also have a good reputation for security and compliance.

On the other hand, there are a number of factors that could suggest that there is still room for another exchange in Hong Kong. First, the crypto market is still growing rapidly, and there is a demand for more choice and competition among exchanges. Second, the existing exchanges are not without their critics. Some have accused them of being too restrictive in their trading policies, while others have raised concerns about their security practices.

Whether or not there is a need for a third exchange licence in Hong Kong is a matter of opinion. However, the approval of HKVAX suggests that the SFC believes that there is still room for growth in the crypto market in Hong Kong.

Is there enough room for growth?

The answer to this question depends on a number of factors, including the size of the crypto market in Hong Kong, the fees charged by exchanges, and the level of competition.

The crypto market in Hong Kong is still relatively small, but it is growing rapidly. In 2022, the total trading volume of cryptocurrencies in Hong Kong was estimated to be around $100 billion. This is expected to grow to over $200 billion by 2025.

The fees charged by exchanges vary, but they are typically around 0.1% to 0.2% of the trading volume. This means that an exchange with a trading volume of $100 billion would generate around $100 million in fees per year.

The fees are not the only determining factor. While the regulatory framework prioritizes consumer protection, it’s important to consider whether the balance between safeguarding investors and fostering innovation is being adequately struck. The current regulatory limitations, such as the 12-month cooling-off period for token listings, restrictions on crypto derivatives, staking, airdrops, and the ban on stablecoins, appear to hinder the development of a comprehensive digital asset market. This would also mean that the exchanges will miss out the current hype and revenue from newly hyped-up tokens.

Is there enough liquidity depth for Hong Kong Dollar pair? That is another issue totally. The level of competition in the crypto exchange market in Hong Kong is also growing. In addition to the three licensed exchanges, there are a number of unlicensed exchanges operating in the city. This competition could drive down fees and make it more difficult for new entrants to make a profit.

Conclusion

Overall, it is difficult to say definitively whether or not there is enough money to be made for one more player in the crypto exchange market in Hong Kong. However, the factors discussed above suggest that there is a good possibility that a third exchange could be successful.

Maybe a final comment from my end is from an economic viability point of view. With the emergence of HKVAX as the third licensed exchange, questions arise about the potential profitability of additional players in the market. While having a competitive landscape can drive innovation and enhance user experience, it’s essential to assess whether the existing demand for crypto trading services can sustain another entrant. The revenue potential, user base growth, and differentiated offerings are factors that should be considered before granting further licenses.

The approval of HKVAX as the third licensed crypto exchange in Hong Kong is a significant milestone for the city’s crypto industry. It suggests that the SFC is committed to creating a favorable regulatory environment for crypto businesses. However, it remains to be seen whether there is enough demand and profit potential to support another exchange in Hong Kong.

Source: https://www.securities.io/is-there-a-need-for-a-third-exchange-license-in-hong-kong/

Anndy Lian

Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author- “NFT: From Zero to Hero” and “Blockchain Revolution 2030”.

Currently, he is appointed as the Chief Digital Advisor at Mongolia Productivity Organization, championing national digitization. Prior to his current appointments, he was the Chairman of BigONE Exchange, a global top 30 ranked crypto spot exchange and was also the Advisory Board Member for Hyundai DAC, the blockchain arm of South Korea’s largest car manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group. Lian played a pivotal role as the Blockchain Advisor for Asian Productivity Organisation (APO), an intergovernmental organization committed to improving productivity in the Asia-Pacific region.

An avid supporter of incubating start-ups, Anndy has also been a private investor for the past eight years. With a growth investment mindset, Anndy strategically demonstrates this in the companies he chooses to be involved with. He believes that what he is doing through blockchain technology currently will revolutionise and redefine traditional businesses. He also believes that the blockchain industry has to be “redecentralised”.

www.anndy.com

j j j

November 22nd, 2022

How many cronos tokens are there? CRO token circulation analysis

Crypto.com is one of the biggest crypto exchanges out there, however, recent negative sentiment and the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange have sent its native token, cronos (CRO), into a downwards spiral, forcing it to lose over 90% of its value from $0.8992 in November 2021 to $0.0698 a year later.

What are the latest token analytics suggesting, and how many cronos tokens are there?

What is CRO?

CRO is the native cryptocurrency of the Crypto.com chain and the Cronos EVM Chain. It was formerly known as the Crypto.org Coin before being renamed to CRO.

Crypto.com is a public, open-source and permissionless blockchain that aims to help drive the mass adoption of blockchain technology through decentralised finance (DeFi), payments and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The platform has named itself as the “next generation public blockchain”.

The platform was co-founded in 2016 by Kris Marszalek, Rafael Melo, Bobby Bao and Gary Or and is now operated as a desktop and mobile application.

The Cronos EVM Chain is the first ever Ethereum-compatible blockchain that was built on Cosmos SDK technology. It is an open source, permissionless Layer 1 chain that aims to scale the DeFi, GameFi and overall Web3 communities by letting builders instantly port apps and crypto assets from other chains while benefiting from low transaction fees, high throughput and fast finality.

The CRO token powers the ecosystem and is used for staking, which grants users a number of rewards and helps maintain the platform’s security and decentralisation. The cronos cryptocurrency is also used to settle transaction fees on the Crypto.org Chain.

Latest CRO market news

2022 has not been the best year for CRO. The token has fallen by more than 87% from its all-time high of $0.8992 on 24 November 2021 to $0.1093 on 17 June 2022. The dip in the CRO price was heightened as Crypto.com announced on 1 May 2022 that it would be slashing staking rewards for all tiers of its VISA cards “to ensure long-term sustainability”, effective as of 1 June 2022.

Between mid-July 2022 and end of September 2022, Crypto.com has received a number of licence updates worldwide, including Italy, Cyprus, South Korea, Australia, Canada, the UK and France. In addition, on 12 October 2022 the firm said that Paris was established as its European Regional Headquarters and invested €150m (around $155m, as of 18 November) in France to support market operations.

Between 25 October 2022 and 28 October 2022, Crypto.com had signed three MOUs: one with the game software developing studio ACT Games; one with the city of Busan in South Korea to advance the blockchain industry; and one more with global content studio A Story to develop NFT collaborations.

However, amid all the positive news, Crypto.com has also been caught in an array of negative news. An article published on 6 October 2022 by Ad Age tech claimed that the platform had cut off deals with a number of big sports organisations, including the Los Angeles’ Angels City Football Club, the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar and the online sports tournament host Twitch Rivals. The article cited unanimous former and current Crypto.com employees.

In addition, according to a series of Tweets by the article’s journalist Asa Hiken, between “June and August, 30-40% of Crypto[dot]com’s entire workforce left the company, per former and current employees. That’s 2,000+ departures — the vast majority of which were layoffs.”

The company did not address the reports.

Now, let’s take a closer look at how many cronos tokens there are now.

How many cronos tokens are there?

So, let’s have a look at how many cronos tokens are available in circulation as of 18 November 2022.

According to data provided by CoinMarketCap, the maximum supply of the cronos tokens is 30.2 billion, meaning that once the total number of cronos tokens in circulation reaches that value, new tokens can no longer be mined. The current circulating supply of the CRO coin surpassed 25 billion.

However, this was not always the case for the cryptocurrency.

When the cryptocurrency was launched in 2018, its maximum supply was fixed at 100 billion coins. But, in order for the Crypto.com network to become fully decentralised at Mainnet Launch, Crypto.com decided to burn 70 billion CRO tokens in what it called “the largest token burn in history”. This was announced by the platform on 22 February 2021.

The platform released a schedule which shows that an initial batch of 59.6 billion CRO tokens was burned on 22 February 2021. Meanwhile, 10.4 billion coins were locked in a smart contract and would be burned every month as they get unlocked. This was aiming to increase the cryptocurrency circulating supply from 24% at the time to over 80%.

The remaining 5.9 billion CRO tokens were distributed in the following way:

5 billion CRO were allocated to mainnet block rewards for Chain validators and delegators
0.9 billion CRO were allocated to the development of the Chain ecosystem

Of that 70 billion burned:

20 billion tokens came from the platform’s capital reserve
5.5 billion coins came from the platform’s community development
10.4 billion tokens came from secondary distribution and launch incentives
20 billion tokens came from ecosystem grants
20 billion tokens came from network long-term incentives

Who are the biggest CRO token holders?

Now that we have established how many cronos tokens are in circulation, let’s take a look at the biggest CRO token holders.

Data provided by etherscan.io showed that, as of 18 November, there were 281,902 CRO holders in total. The 10 biggest CRO holders collectively owned 92.54% of the total token supply in circulation, meanwhile the top 100 owned 95.93%.

The website noted that the top account holding the most CRO tokens in total was a Null Address owning over 77 billion coins, amounting to 77.89% of the total circulating supply. Crypto.com was also among the top CRO holders in the world, owning around 7 billion tokens or approximately 6.9% of the total supply.

Analyst thoughts

Anndy Lian, chief digital advisor at the Mongolian Productivity Organisation and author of ‘NFT: From Zero to Hero’ told Capital.com that while burning 70% of the then maximum CRO token supply was a good decision, doing so in 2021 was a “downside”.

“Personally, I would prefer them to burn and then buyback in stages of burning such a huge amount. The burn back then did make the market perceive that the remaining tokens have more value but that was short lived.”

Lian added that taking into consideration everything that has happened with the FTX crypto exchange in recent weeks, CRO holders are also getting anxious about the wellbeing of the Crypto.com platform, however, Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek’s live AMA session on YouTube on 14 November 2022 helped calm those worries down.

“Crypto.com is still facing potential bank run in my humble opinion. This to me is one of the biggest risks that CRO has a direct impact on.”

The bottom line

While knowing key info about the cronos tokenomics and circulating supply is important for accessing the project’s health, it shouldn’t substitute your own research. You should always conduct your own due diligence before trading, looking at the latest news, technical and fundamental analysis, and a wide range of analysts’ opinions before making any trading decision.

Keep in mind that past performance is no guarantee of future returns. And never trade or invest money that you cannot afford to lose.

Source: https://capital.com/how-many-cro-tokens-are-there-crypto-com-circulation-analysis

Anndy Lian

www.anndy.com

j j j

September 19th, 2022

A Look At Chipmakers In The Wake Of The Ethereum Merge. Is There Still Demand For Graphics Cards?

Considered the world’s most actively used blockchain network, Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) has successfully transitioned from a mining and energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to a proof-of-stake (PoS) model that replaces miners with validators.

Dubbed as The Merge, this move has been touted to help improve Ethereum’s scalability, reduce its energy requirements and make its entire ecosystem more secure.

However, the elimination of the need to mine Ethereum will undoubtedly impact the overall global graphic processing unit (GPU) demand, casting doubt over the future growth potential of chipmakers like NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: NASDAQ:NVDA), Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NASDAQ: NASDAQ:AMD) and others.

Delving into Nvidia’s quarterly results to understand the revenue share of GPUs in its overall business does paint a less extreme picture than what is being surmised.

ETH upgrade to impact NVIDIA revenue:

Lian Offering a viewpoint on how Ethereum’s transition will impact NVIDIA and other chipmakers, thought leader and best-selling author Anndy Lian says, “The Merge will completely remove the need for miners, who are currently securing the Ethereum network. They will replace them with validators. This upgrade would lead to a big revenue miss for NVIDIA, whose stock was down by nearly 20% compared to the previous quarter, associated to a slowdown in the gaming business and weakness in the global markets.”

The impact of the change to POS would be reduced if the forked POW chains can keep their demand high, getting support from big miners and backed by strong communities who believe that POW is the core value.

“If this is executed properly with the support of companies like NVIDIA, this market push is likely to put these listed chipmakers in a much better position,” Lian adds.

The world leader in the discrete graphics card business, NVIDIA’s graphics business contributes to 58% of the company’s revenues and 62% of its operating income, according to Investopedia.

This includes the GeForce GPUs, GeForce NOW game-streaming service and solutions for gaming platforms provided by NVIDIA.

GPU market to post healthy growth

Despite the fact that sales for the GeForce GPU will be affected by the drop in GPU demand on account of Ethereum’s design change, analysts expect the overall GPU market to post healthy growth rates over the next five years due to strong demand from the gaming industry.

What is worrisome, however, will be the loss of pricing power that companies like NVIDIA enjoyed as long as the semiconductor chip shortage lasted.

With demand pressures and pricing challenges increasing, chipmakers like NVIDIA will need to aggressively focus on other verticals to maintain profit margins.

Echoing this sentiment, Raj Kapoor, Founder and CEO of India Blockchain Alliance says that Ethereum is not the only coin that mines decently on a graphics card and that Beam and Ravencoin are actually similarly profitable at this time, and even when ETH mining stops, those would still continue.

According to experts, post The Merge, crypto miners will be looking elsewhere for mining opportunities as long as there are other coins that will reward them for their effort.

“It is also possible that combined with the great crypto value crash of 2022, some miners decide to get out of the business altogether. Some may even try and make their own forked version of Ethereum, one that requires mining and no rules. We would probably see increased availability of second-hand GPUs that have been mined to bits as a result of the second-largest crypto moving away from mining,” Kapoor says.

He adds that with ETH’s move to PoS being in the cards for a long time, most miners will have planned ahead with alternative money-making endeavors.

Once the flooding of GPUs in the used market stops, GPU demand would revert back to previous levels, unless there is some other factor that reduces the overall demand.

With the increased usage of computers for entertainment and work purposes being a trend that will stay, eventually, all forces will balance out again.

As for companies like NVIDIA that are involved in the manufacturing and distribution of GPUs, they’re already bundling them with other products and exploring other business verticals to supplement their profits, he further says.

While the short-term effect of Ethereum’s shift to a PoS model will dent sales for NVIDIA and other chipmakers, the overall growth story for GPUs and allied services seems intact.

Moreover, as these companies expand their range of products and services into areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), their reliance on the crypto world will eventually fade away and will be replaced by Web3-focused consumer products in the near future.

Source: https://uk.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/a-look-at-chipmakers-in-the-wake-of-the-ethereum-merge-is-there-still-demand-for-graphics-cards-2754422