The shares of HashKey increased by 3 percent on Wednesday, when it began trading on the Hong Kong stock exchange, following the crypto exchange raising $206 million in its initial public offering, a time when cryptocurrencies have suffered a blow.
The largest licensed crypto exchange in Hong Kong, HashKey, priced the IPO at HK6.68 per share, which is close to the upper end of the marketed price range of HK5.95 to HK6.95, and raised approximately 1.6 billion Hong Kong dollars.
Although mainland China has banned cryptocurrencies with a blanket ban in place since 2021, in Hong Kong, there has been more openness towards digital assets.
Therefore, the main cornerstone investors were Fidelity, UBS, a Chinese investment firm, CDH Investments, and Cithara Fund, among others. JPMorgan and the financial services company Guotai Haitong were some of the joint bookrunners.
HashKey Chief Financial Officer Eric Zhu informed CNBC that “Our mission is to make digital assets massively accessible, and what we are doing is to create a compliant platform to connect our users with the digital assets industry.”
Zhu stated that “We are confident that the [crypto] penetration rate in Hong Kong, in the Asian market, is going to catch up with what happens in the U.S.”
The listing follows a series of volatility recently experienced in the international cryptocurrency markets following its peak levels. Bitcoin, the biggest cryptocurrency globally, has fallen about 36 percent during the last month after reaching an all-time high and passing beyond the previous 126,000 by the beginning of October. It is already down approximately 6 percent in the year.
As HashKey was established in 2018, it operates a licensed digital asset platform that provides exchange trading, over-the-counter services, on-chain services such as staking and tokenization, and asset management solutions for institutional and retail clients.
CIO at GROW Investment Group, William Ma, said that “This is a milestone for the digital asset and wealth management industry in Asia. We believe Hong Kong is establishing itself as a key hub for regulated digital assets in Asia.”
