Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin makes last-minute appearance at Hong Kong Web3 Festival as city woos industry
- Vitalik Buterin made a rare last-minute appearance at Hong Kong’s biggest Web3 event for a 20-minute technical talk on blockchain tech
- Hong Kong has been making a greater effort to woo big-name speakers to the city as it seeks to become a virtual asset hub
The entrepreneur, regarded as a major figure in crypto communities because of his influence over one of the world’s most widely used blockchains, last year cautioned industry players about setting up shop in Hong Kong, suggesting the stability of the city’s new-found support for virtual assets as of the end of 2022 could be fickle.
“Obviously it’s very friendly now,” Buterin said at the Web3 Transitions Summit in Singapore in September 2023. “But the big question I’m asking, and I think [everyone] is asking, is how stable is the level of friendliness.”
He added that if a crypto project wants to make Hong Kong their home, it would need to be confident that the city will continue to be friendly to the sector many years from now, “when all kinds of unknown, regulatory and political events are going to happen”.
Buterin acknowledged at the time that he does not “understand Hong Kong well”, and even less the “complicated interaction between Hong Kong and the mainland lately”.
His comments prompted a response from Hong Kong lawmaker Johnny Ng Kit-chong, who said on X, formerly Twitter, that “Hong Kong’s policies and laws will not change overnight”, and dismissed the idea of any complications because Beijing supports the “one country, two systems” arrangement that allows the city some policy autonomy. Commercial use of cryptocurrency is strictly banned in mainland China.