Clients who have investable assets worth more than $8 million Hong Kong dollars or institutions with assets worth more than $40 million Hong Kong dollars are eligible.
Interactive Brokers (IBKR) has started providing cryptocurrency trading to professional investors in Hong Kong in collaboration with the cryptocurrency exchange OSL Digital Securities.
Individuals and institutions having investable assets over 40 million Hong Kong dollars ($5 million) and 8 million Hong Kong dollars ($1 million) respectively are considered eligible clients.
The goal of Interactive Brokers and OSL is to provide clients with a single platform where they can trade stocks, options, futures, bonds, and other financial instruments alongside bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH).
The two firms collaborated to launch cryptocurrency trading in Hong Kong in June due to the city’s significant concentration of institutional and professional investors.
Hong Kong’s potential regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies has received conflicting indications in recent months. In October, it announced that its Financial Services and Treasury Bureau was looking into allowing retail clients to trade cryptocurrency or sanctioning a cryptocurrency exchange-traded fund (ETF).
However, Julia Leung (then the deputy CEO of the Securities and Futures Commission and now the CEO) called for stricter regulations on cryptocurrency firms in November, pointing out how the collapse of the FTX exchange illustrated the danger that digital assets might pose because of their connections to conventional financial services.