Hong Kong is positioning itself as crypto’s global connector, says lawmaker Johnny Ng

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

As regulators in Washington, Beijing and elsewhere in Asia chart their own paths for digital assets, the Hong Kong legislator is focused on something else entirely: building connective tissue between markets, technologies, and jurisdictions that rarely move in sync.

Representing the technology sector in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council – the city’s parliament – Ng, who will be speaking at CoinDesk’s Consensus Hong Kong conference next month, has emerged as one of the city’s most vocal advocates for Web3 and digital assets.

Over the past two years, he has pushed through stablecoin legislation, backed crypto exchange licensing and helped position Hong Kong as an early mover in regulated crypto finance. But he said his broader ambition is 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 really highly linked with the traditional financial system,” Ng said in an interview with CoinDesk at his legislative office in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong’s role, in his view, starts with its existing strengths: easily understood common law, English language courts, free capital flows, and a dense concentration of global banks, asset managers, lawyers, and auditors.

“Hong Kong is one of the largest international finance centers,” he said, arguing that this foundation allows the city to build a crypto hub that is “safe, secure and moving along the way.”

That positioning becomes more powerful when viewed through the lens of the Greater Bay Area, an initiative by the government of Hong Kong to increase trade among it, major hubs in neighboring Shenzhen and Macau – the other Special Administrative Region of China, he said.

While Shenzhen is best known as the workshop of the world, with factories that churn out the latest electronics, Ng repeatedly returned to the idea that Hong Kong does not need to replicate Shenzhen or Guangzhou’s engineering culture. It needs to connect to it.

Hong Kong brings Common Law and open capital markets. Mainland cities bring scale, manufacturing depth, and a young, technically skilled workforce.

“In Shenzhen, the average age of the people is really young, under 30,” Ng said, describing a city of engineers and technologists with the capacity to turn ideas into products.

“Hong Kong can be a bridge,” he said, explaining how capital, legal structure and global market access can link up with mainland innovation. “We can think something, and then we realize something by their human capital.”

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

That bridge-building mindset also shapes Ng’s global outlook. In 2023, during a period of aggressive enforcement actions against crypto companies by U.S. regulators, Ng made international headlines by publicly inviting Coinbase and other exchanges to consider Hong Kong.

At the time, the move was widely read as competitive signaling. Ng now frames it differently.

“I’m not going to see the competition with any countries,” he said. “Crypto cannot be easily divided by country or economy. It is one world.”

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

“I want the Hong Kong government to make more connections with different jurisdictions, the governing bodies together,” he said, pointing to the need for clearer standards that allow crypto to link more directly with real-world economic activity.

It’s a new year, and the Legislative Council of Hong Kong is beginning another session, reconvening after the fall election. Looking ahead, Ng said the next phase is about plumbing. Custody and OTC regulations are coming this year, along with potential changes that could allow higher-volume trading for professional investors.

Ng also sees convergence coming from another direction: artificial intelligence. Hong Kong, he argued, occupies a unique position, able to work with both Western and Chinese datasets and be a place where AI companies from around the world work together.

For Ng, Hong Kong’s bet is not that it can outbuild or outmuscle other crypto or AI hubs. It is that, by staying open, regulated and connected, it can sit at the center of a system that is still very much under construction.