Crypto trading in mainland China and Hong Kong drops along with East Asia activity, but adoption continues: report
- Cryptocurrency trading volume was down in mainland China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan in the year through June, according to Chainalysis
- Hong Kong’s embrace of crypto markets has also ‘fostered bubbling optimism’ in the region, providing a ‘potential tailwind’
Cryptocurrency activities in East Asia have declined in recent years since Beijing’s crackdown on the market, but Hong Kong’s new virtual asset-friendly policies offer a glimmer of hope in the region, according to research firm Chainalysis.
The value of cryptocurrency transactions in both mainland China and Hong Kong dropped over the past year as Beijing maintained a strict ban on the assets in the mainland and amid an extended crypto market slump, new Chainalysis data showed.
Hong Kong, which the firm called “an extremely active crypto market”, received an estimated US$64 billion in crypto transactions for the year, rivalling trading in the mainland with just 0.5 per cent of its population, Chainalysis noted.
Still, this is a slight decline from transaction volume in Hong Kong during the same period a year earlier, when more than US$70 billion was traded.
Cryptocurrency investors are still hunkering down as the sector struggles to recover. In the second quarter this year, trading volume on centralised crypto exchanges dropped to its lowest level since the fourth quarter of 2019, according to a report published in June by statistics provider CCData.