Amid increasing legal hurdles in the US, Coinbase is getting better support from Hong Kong.
Coinbase is an American public crypto firm that trades on the Nasdaq exchange under the index COIN. Last week, the United States Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Coinbase over unregistered securities offerings & running national securities exchange without regulatory approval. The Coinbase executives confirmed that they will keep their services unchanged, despite the SEC’s suit.
On 10 June 2023, Hong Kong legislator Johnny Ng took to Twitter to invite all the global crypto companies, Including Coinbase exchange, to set up their crypto trade business in the Hong Kong jurisdiction under clear rules & regulations.
The legislator also said that he will be happy to assist the crypto companies if they are interested to set up their business in the country.
Coinbase CEO on SEC’s suit
Recently Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong appeared in an interview with Wall Street Journal (WSJ). In the interview, Armstrong said that the Coinbase exchange caught in the middle of the two American financial regulatory bodies.
According to Armstrong, the US CFTC & US SEC are already in conflict & they are not clear, whether which crypto asset is commodity & which one is security.
The coinbase CEO reminded us that once the SEC body said that Ethereum was a security token, whole the CFTC body claimed that Ethereum was a commodity.
Furthermore, Armstrong said that such things are forcing Congress to step into this matter & bring a new framework/rule to provide clarity.
Armstrong also said that Coinbase always followed a proper systematic approach to list only commodity crypto tokens and also Coinbase has all the paper records, under which its team analysed to make sure that listed crypto tokens was commodity, not security.
Hong Kong & Crypto Adoption
Hong Kong is a special administrative region of China. In China crypto is banned since 1 Jan 2022, while Hong Kong only banned retail crypto trading in 2020.
This month, Hong Kong brought a new rule to allow all retail investors to invest in crypto assets, and also Hong Kong’s Securities regulatory body accepting applications from interested crypto companies, willing to set up their businesses in Hong Kong under clear rules & regulations.
Read also: Solana Foundation disagrees with the characterization of SOL as a security
