December 18, CSPay, a third-party cryptocurrency payment platform, has officially announced its entry into the Hong Kong market. It shows a positive signal that the Hong Kong financial regulatory authorities have a more clear attitude towards virtual assets and intend to gradually form this emerging asset under regulation.

Liang Weihan, the founder of CSPay, said at the press conference that,

“As the increasing popularity of cryptocurrencies, the transaction costs will be reduced significantly, that will enable cryptocurrency to be used more widely in various financial application scenarios, instead of limited to a kind of digital assets or investment vehicles.”

Liang indicated that the number of digital assets holders in Hong Kong is less than 10,000, which shows cryptocurrency has not been popularized as a general payment method. There are many complex issues, for example, the fluctuation in price, which is hard to predict.

Merchants will face high exchange risk when they accept cryptocurrency payment. Moreover, due to the distribution of blockchain nodes, the crypto transaction still takes a long time at present. There is also a more than 5% to 7% transaction fee that stops merchants from trying.

In addition, due to the ambiguous regulatory issue, cryptocurrency payment popularization still has a long way to go.

For the time being, Singapore is the most “friendly” city to Bitcoin. The financial authority Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has launched a sandbox regulatory regime for cryptocurrency in June 2016.

Fortunately, Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) has finally launched a statement on the crypto regulatory framework on November 1. The SFC will also propose a sandbox for crypto trading. This initiative shows the financial authority in Hong Kong is putting efforts in virtual assets regulation with a positive attitude.

This time, Huawei Cloud, the cloud services arm of Huawei Global, has also become a cooperative partner to work with CSPay in opening up the Hong Kong market.

He Qixiang, Market & Development Director of Huawei Cloud, indicate that Hong Kong market is very important in their global business layout at the press conference.

“The Cloud business is based on the existing consumer business, communications business, and enterprise business of Huawei. We launched our cloud business in mainland China market in 2015, and Hong Kong is the first stop of our overseas cloud business.”