Hong Kong is positioning itself as crypto’s global nexus, says lawmaker Johnny Ng

Johnny Ng is not interested in zero-sum cryptopolitics.

While regulators in Washington, Beijing and elsewhere in Asia are charting their own paths for digital assets, the Hong Kong legislature is focused on something else entirely: building connective tissue between markets, technologies and jurisdictions that rarely move in sync.

Ng, who represents the technology sector in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council – the city’s parliament – ​​will speak at CoinDesk’s Consensus Hong Kong conference next month, and has emerged as one of the city’s most vocal advocates for Web3 and digital assets.

Over the past two years, he has pushed through stablecoin legislation, supported crypto exchange licenses and helped position Hong Kong as an early mover in regulated crypto finance. But he said his broader ambition is structural. He sees Hong Kong as a bridge, not a battleground, between East and West and between traditional finance and crypto-native innovation.

“Crypto and Web3 are really strongly connected to the traditional financial system,” Ng said in an interview with CoinDesk at his legislative office in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong’s role, in his view, starts with its existing strengths: easy-to-understand common law, English-language courts, free capital flows and a dense concentration of global banks, asset managers, lawyers and accountants.

“Hong Kong is one of the largest international financial centers,” he said, arguing that this foundation allows the city to build a crypto hub that is “safe, secure and moving.”

This positioning becomes more powerful when viewed through the lens of the Greater Bay Area, an initiative by the Hong Kong government to increase trade between it, major hubs in neighboring Shenzhen and Macau – the other special administrative region of China, he said.

While Shenzhen is best known as the workshop of the world, with factories producing the latest electronics, Ng repeatedly returned to the idea that Hong Kong need not copy the engineering culture of Shenzhen or Guangzhou. It must be connected to it.

Hong Kong brings Common Law and open capital markets. Mainland cities bring scale, manufacturing depth and a young, tech-savvy workforce.

“In Shenzhen, the average age of the population is really young, under 30,” Ng said, describing a city of engineers and technologists with the capacity to turn ideas into products.

“Hong Kong can be a bridge,” he said, explaining how capital, legal structure and global market access can link to mainland innovation. “We can think something and then we realize something with their human capital.”

Ng even points to crypto history to make the case. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin was often in Zhuhai, Shenzhen and Hong Kong during the early years of the Ethereum blockchain. The region, Ng argues, has long been fertile ground for protocol-level experimentation. What Hong Kong adds is regulatory clarity and financial credibility.

The bridge-building mindset also shapes Ng’s global outlook. In 2023, during a period of aggressive enforcement actions against crypto companies by US regulators, Ng made international headlines by publicly inviting Coinbase and other exchanges to consider Hong Kong.

At the time, the move was widely read as competitive signaling. Ng now frames it differently.

“I’m not going to see the competition with any countries,” he said. “Crypto cannot be easily divided by country or economy. It is one world.”

Instead of rivalry, Ng argued that the industry needs regulatory coordination and predictability across jurisdictions.

“I want the Hong Kong government to make more connections with different jurisdictions, the governing bodies together,” he said, pointing to the need for clearer standards that allow crypto to connect more directly with real-world economic activity.

It’s a new year and the Legislative Council of Hong Kong begins another session, reconvening after the autumn elections. Looking ahead, Ng said the next phase is about plumbing. Custody and OTC regulations are coming this year along with potential changes that could allow higher volume trading for professional investors.

Ng also sees convergence coming from another direction: artificial intelligence. Hong Kong, he argued, occupies a unique position, able to work with both Western and Chinese data sets and be a place where AI companies from around the world work together.

For Ng, Hong Kong’s bet is not that it can develop or out-engineer other crypto or AI hubs. It’s that by remaining open, regulated and connected, it can sit at the center of a system that is still very much under construction.