Hong Kong minister touts gold as ‘bridge between conventional and new finance’

Gold can serve as a “potential bridge” between conventional and new forms of finance, Hong Kong’s treasury minister has said, highlighting the need for the city to provide more opportunities for the digital asset market to grow.

Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury Christopher Hui Ching-yu also said on Wednesday that Hong Kong had opted against forming a separate regulatory authority for digital assets due to the “convergence” between conventional and innovative finance.

During a panel session on cryptocurrencies and digital assets at the Global Prosperity Summit, Hui said he had seen not only gold exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in conventional markets, but also tokenised versions available on the blockchain.

“For this market to grow sustainably, and as a market builder, we need to harness the good and one way of doing this is to give this market more opportunities that are otherwise not available,” Hui said.

“I think gold could be a potential bridge between conventional and new finance, in the sense of applying blockchain to a rather old asset class.”

HSBC and its subsidiary Hang Seng Investment launched a tokenised, unlisted class of the Hang Seng Gold ETF on the HashKey Exchange virtual asset trading platform in April, in what the bank said was the city’s first such product.