香港虚拟资产交易平台监管政策研究

Study on Virtual Asset Platform Regulation in Hong Kong

虚拟资产交易平台被认为是香港虚拟资产相关活动中最普遍且发展最为成熟的业务模式。香港的相关监管政策及监管的底层逻辑与国际标准一致:沿用证券法例的框架对虚拟资产交易平台进行监管;监管标准上与传统监管证券经纪—经销商及自动化交易平台的标准趋同;监管目标上注重管控整体风险及增强投资者保护。行业发展趋势及其他地区监管政策的最新动态表明,未来如果继续拓展适用证券法例的框架,监管政策的可持续发展须考虑以下几个重要问题:是否以功能性为主对平台进行区分监管;是否将去中心化平台纳入监管与解决相关的技术及理论问题;就个人投资者而言,是否引入金融普惠原则以平衡虚拟资产市场带来的风险与机遇,以及如何促进行业的自律监管及与政府部门的监管合作。

Among Hong Kong’s virtual asset related activities,virtual asset platform is the most common and most developed business model.Hong Kong’s regulatory framework and the underlying logic it adopts are consistent with the international standard.It currently adopts the securities law framework to govern these platforms,and the regulatory standards are close to the ones that used to govern broker-dealer and the automated trading system.The regulatory focus is to control the overall risk and to strengthen the investor protection.In future,the sustainability of such framework would depend on whether several important issues could be properly resolved:whether the functional test or formality test is adopted in justifying different regulatory treatment towards platforms;whether to regulate decentralized platform and how to address the technical and theoretical challenges it poses to traditional regulatory framework;whether to incorporate the principle of financial inclusion in balancing the risks and opportunities the market brought to the individual investors;and how to promote self-regulation and to strengthen the regulatory cooperation between the government and the industry.