Hong Kong positions itself as global crypto connector, says lawmaker Johnny Ng

Johnny Ng is not interested in zero-sum crypto politics.

While regulators in Washington, Beijing and elsewhere in Asia chart their own course for digital assets, Hong Kong lawmakers are focused on something else: creating connective tissue between markets, technologies and jurisdictions that rarely move in sync.

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

Over the past two years, he has pushed through stablecoin legislation, supported crypto exchange licensing and helped position Hong Kong as one of the first players in regulated crypto finance. But he said his broader ambition was 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 very closely linked to the traditional financial system,” Ng said in an interview with CoinDesk at his legislative office in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong’s role, he says, begins with its existing strengths: easy-to-understand common law, English-speaking courts, free capital flows and a high concentration of global banks, asset managers, lawyers and auditors.

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

This positioning becomes more powerful when viewed through the prism of the Greater Bay Area, a Hong Kong government initiative to increase trade between it, the main hubs of neighboring Shenzhen and Macau – China’s other special administrative region, 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 does not need to replicate the engineering culture of Shenzhen or Guangzhou. He needs to connect to it.

Hong Kong brings Common Law and the opening of capital markets. The continent’s cities bring scale, manufacturing depth and a young, technically skilled workforce.

“In Shenzhen, the average age of the population is very young, less than 30,” Ng said, describing a city of engineers and technologists who can turn ideas into products.

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

Ng even points to the history of crypto to make his point. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin was frequently in Zhuhai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong during the early years of the Ethereum blockchain. According to Ng, the region has long provided fertile ground for protocol experimentation. What Hong Kong adds is regulatory clarity and financial credibility.

This bridging mindset also shapes Ng’s worldview. In 2023, during a period of aggressive enforcement action against crypto companies by US regulators, Ng made international headlines by publicly calling on Coinbase and other exchanges to consider Hong Kong.

At the time, the move was widely seen as a signal of competition. Ng now presents it differently.

“I will not see competition with any country,” he said. “Crypto cannot be easily divided by country or economy. It’s one world.”

Rather than rivalry, Ng argued that the industry needs regulatory coordination and predictability across jurisdictions.

“I wish the Hong Kong government would establish more connections with different jurisdictions, governing bodies together,” he said, emphasizing the need for clearer standards allowing crypto to be more directly linked to real-world economic activity.

It’s a new year and the Hong Kong Legislative Council begins a new session, which will reconvene after the autumn elections. Looking ahead, Ng said the next phase would be plumbing. Custodial and over-the-counter regulations are coming this year, along with potential changes that could enable higher volume trading for professional investors.

Ng also sees convergence coming from another direction: artificial intelligence. He said Hong Kong is in a unique position, able to work with Western and Chinese datasets and being a place where AI companies from around the world work together.

For Ng, Hong Kong’s bet is not to outdo or outperform other crypto or AI hubs. This is because by remaining open, regulated and connected, it can sit at the center of a system still under construction.