As town makes a giant push to turn into a digital asset and Web3 hub, the experiences supply insights for market individuals and regulators, domestically and internationally, which can assist kind coverage initiatives and market improvements, Fung mentioned at a media briefing on Tuesday.

HKIMR coordinated with consultancy PwC to conduct the 2 surveys, learning organisations within the asset and wealth administration, banking, insurance coverage, digital asset and metaverse service industries.

A complete of 59 entities took half within the survey on DeFi, which is the supply of monetary providers with out conventional monetary intermediaries, providing a less expensive, accessible and safe different. In the meantime, 55 establishments joined the survey on metaverse, a know-how platform to expertise digital actuality.

Native market individuals are more and more eager on digital belongings. Greater than half of the monetary establishments within the DeFi survey have already included such belongings into their core enterprise operations, whereas 85 per cent anticipate to have completed so three years from now.

Within the metaverse research, 65 per cent of the respondents mentioned they’re concerned within the digital actuality world with purposes starting from advertising and promotion to inner operations and from expertise recruitment to office social occasions that assist promote “interactions with customers, employees and the general public”, mentioned Giorgio Valente, head of HKIMR.

A standard problem is the shortage of expertise and experience, which impacts the progress of the adoption of those applied sciences, in line with the experiences. Different key hurdles embody uncertainty in governance buildings, authorized and regulatory compliance, cybersecurity and knowledge administration dangers.

Fung mentioned the tenet for regulating monetary improvements worldwide has been “same activity, same risk, same regulation” with some native nuances.

“The broad direction [in] the overall international community is to provide a certain level of consistency, coordination and collaboration on many aspects,” Fung mentioned, referring to monitoring dangers and knowledge gaps.

“Hong Kong regulators have been very active in participating in those regulatory discussions. We have a role to play in the international standard-setting bodies, providing our input and consolidating our role as an international financial centre.”