HONG KONG – Financial regulators in Hong Kong will unveil a framework for trading platforms that can offer perpetual contracts, the head of the region’s Securities and Futures Commission said on Wednesday.
Brokers in Hong Kong will soon be able to provide financing to clients backed by bitcoin and ether and platforms will be able to offer marketmaking through independent entities, said Julia Leung, executive director of Hong Kong’s SFC at CoinDesk’s Consensus Hong Kong conference.
While the SFC plans to share more details later, the moves are part of the regulator’s broader push to let regulated firms offer more products and services, Leung said, following its 2025 roadmap, which included efforts to develop the local crypto market.
The SFC has already published the conclusions of its consultation on custody and related issues, but these new initiatives are focused on continuing to develop these markets in Hong Kong, including with new products such as perpetual futures contracts.
“We will publish a high-level framework for platforms to offer perpetual contracts,” she said.
Those products will only be available to institutional investors, not retail clients, at this time, she said, and the framework will focus on risks. Platforms seeking to offer these products must be able to manage these risks, “and it must also be very fair to customers.”
As for the other initiatives, Leung said the SFC will start sharing further details soon.
“We will allow brokers to provide financing to clients with strong … credit profiles, and the collateral will be backed by both securities as well as virtual assets,” she said. “Because virtual assets … many of them are very volatile, so we’ll start with two that will be eligible as collateral, bitcoin and ether.”
Platforms that want to engage in market-making will need to ensure they have strong conflict-of-interest rules and independent market-making entities, she said.
