Grand Opening | Highlights of the First Day of 2024 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival

The 2024 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival opened, and guests including Wanxiang Group Chairman Lu Weiding, Wanxiang Blockchain Chairman Xiao Feng, Hong Kong Financial Deputy Secretary Wong Wai-lun, Hong Kong Legislative Council Member Qiu Dagen, and ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood delivered wonderful speeches.

Organized by: Luffy, Foresight News

On April 6, Hong Kong, the Web3 industry ushered in another grand event. The 2024 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, co-organized by Wanxiang Blockchain Lab and HashKey Group and hosted by W3ME, opened at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center. Guests including Lu Weiding, Chairman of Wanxiang Group, Xiao Feng, Chairman of Wanxiang Blockchain, Michael Wong, Deputy Secretary for Finance of Hong Kong, David Chiu, Member of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong, and Cathie Wood, CEO of ARK Invest, delivered wonderful speeches.

The morning was the opening ceremony of the four-day conference. Lu Weiding, deputy to the National People’s Congress, vice chairman of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, and chairman and CEO of Wanxiang Group, delivered an opening speech. He said, “In the past two years, Hong Kong has become one of the international virtual asset centers and has global influence in the virtual asset industry. The 2024 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival has some new features. One is global representativeness, with many major projects in Europe and the United States participating; secondly, nearly half of the projects are in the field of blockchain applications.” Lu Weiding is full of expectations for the prospects of Hong Kong Web3. He said, “The 1995 moment of blockchain application is coming, and the next few years will be the best time for Hong Kong’s economic development.”

Michael Wong, Deputy Financial Secretary of Hong Kong, said, “Hong Kong focuses on two areas in the development of Web3. The first is the support for Hong Kong’s virtual asset trading platforms, and the second is the support for Web3 developers. The Hong Kong government is amending a law to bring virtual asset OTC transactions under legal supervision, and the proposed law is being formulated. In addition, Hong Kong will also allow intermediaries to provide trading in qualified virtual assets, futures and ETFs. Looking ahead, we will continue to work with more industry participants to bring more possibilities to Hong Kong with more insights and promote the development of Hong Kong’s Web3 industry.”

Next, Hong Kong Legislative Council member Dagen Qiu delivered a keynote speech entitled “Using Technology to Unleash the Energy of Web3”. He said, “Hong Kong will soon see Bitcoin spot ETF trading. We are currently in the ETH2 era, which includes competition between Optimistic and zkRollup. In the future, we will also see the impact of Crypto on consumption, finance and investment, traditional economy, and central banks. Now there are more financial personnel leading the development of the industry, and financial institutions and financial experts are increasingly integrated with the Hong Kong government’s regulatory governance. We must work together to make Crypto bigger and stronger.” In terms of the progress of virtual assets in Hong Kong, Dagen Qiu said that the new Virtual Asset Trading Platform (VATP) regulatory framework has been implemented, and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has launched a “sandbox” for stablecoin issuers. In the future, Hong Kong will also conduct public consultation on legislative proposals for virtual asset OTC (VAOTC) supervision and launch a personal regulatory framework for virtual asset custodians.

Hong Kong Cyberport Chief Public Mission Officer, Raymond Chan, also delivered a speech, introducing Cyberport’s progress over the past year and some future plans. He said, “The Cyberport Web3 community has grown from 80 members a year ago to more than 220, which is a two-fold increase in one year.” He also revealed, “Cyberport is accelerating the establishment of an artificial intelligence supercomputing center, which is also a center for Hong Kong’s thriving innovative technology industry. This strategic project will inject new power into the development of Web3 and unlock its potential.”

ARK Invest CEO and Chief Investment Officer Cathie Wood had a fireside chat with Deng Chao, head of HashKey Singapore and CEO of HashKey Capital. Cathie Wood said, “While currencies in developing countries around the world are depreciating, Bitcoin continues to rise. We have a brainstorming session about Bitcoin every month. Blockchain has great potential, not just the price of virtual assets itself. For example, blockchain and games will be enabled by AI. Games are early applications of AI, and there will be more AI + Web3 games in the future.” She also made a prediction on the price of Bitcoin, “The result of our analysis from multiple angles is that Bitcoin will rise to $1.5 million in 2030. This price prediction comes from a survey of institutions, using a floating rate and volatility analysis. The previous prediction for the price of Bitcoin in 2030 was $600,000, but the passage of the Bitcoin spot ETF will push the price of Bitcoin to $1.5 million in 2030.” When talking about the Web3 industry in Hong Kong, Cathie Wood said, “Hong Kong is a global leader in crypto regulation and is worth learning from the United States.”

Dominic Williams, founder and chief scientist of the DFINITY Foundation, delivered a keynote speech entitled “Principled Thinking about AI as Smart Contracts”. He discussed how AI works on the blockchain. He said, “Blockchain for AI, tokenization for AI, and AI running on blockchain are completely different topics.”

In his keynote speech entitled “The Latest Development of Virtual Currency in Hong Kong”, Chan Ho-lim, Deputy Director of the Financial Services Bureau of Hong Kong, said, “Hong Kong will be the largest cross-border asset development center in Asia in the future, and Hong Kong-listed companies will become very large investment targets. Hong Kong will be a leader in the future financial technology field. Hong Kong has become increasingly mature in terms of virtual bank issuers and is led by the government. It will be more open to development in the future. At present, Hong Kong’s new developments in the Web3 field include the completion of the virtual asset issuance system.”

Steve Yun, Chairman of the TON Foundation, and John Hyman, Chief Investment Officer of Telegram APP, delivered a keynote speech entitled “Crypto Change in the Telegram Ecosystem”. Steve Yun said, “Web3 has problems in mass adoption, such as complex user experience, lack of simple onboarding methods, no viral marketing, and no distribution channels. TON has solved these problems to a certain extent by integrating wallets, Mini Apps, simple entry mechanisms, and Telegram ads in Telegram. An onboarding layer is needed between Web2 and Web3, which requires simple mechanisms (such as Click-to-Earn), social virality, and gamification (such as Play-to-Earn, Learn-to-Earn, and Use-to-Earn). Viral applications combined with the Web3 economy can achieve mass adoption. The goal of the TON Foundation is to get 30% of Telegram users onboard Web3 by 2028.”

In the afternoon, at the main venue of “The Road to Building Hong Kong’s Digital Economy Center”, HashKey Group COO and HashKey Exchange CEO Weng Xiaoqi said, “In the past year, global crypto compliance has shifted, non-compliant exchanges have been comprehensively cleaned up, and the regulatory direction of global financial centers has become increasingly clear. The three driving forces of crypto compliance are: exchanges, spot ETFs, and stablecoins. Hong Kong took the lead in obtaining compliant licenses for exchanges, the United States has approved Bitcoin spot ETFs, the Hong Kong government has also opened Bitcoin spot ETF applications, and Hong Kong has launched a stablecoin sandbox.” Weng Xiaoqi believes that “subsequent market highlights include: market pressure from non-compliant risk clearing, US dollar interest rate cuts, Bitcoin halving, Hong Kong Bitcoin spot ETFs bringing in Asian capital, Ethereum spot ETFs in the United States and Hong Kong, and explosive DApps giving birth to an application revolution.”

Anna Liu, general manager of HashKey Tokenisation, a tokenization service agency under HashKey Group, delivered a keynote speech on “Hong Kong’s Tokenization Process and Outlook”. She said, “From the perspective of a sound industrial chain, virtual asset trading alone is not enough to support Hong Kong to become a virtual asset center. The aggregation of assets and projects can form a complete closed loop. The construction of a complete international virtual asset center requires three levels: one is a compliant and efficient secondary market (trading market); the second is a primary market (issuance market) based on an active secondary market; and the third is the aggregation of virtual asset upstream and downstream industries based on active primary and secondary markets.”

At the “Web3+AI” session, Xiao Feng, Chairman of Wanxiang Blockchain and Chairman and CEO of HashKey Group, delivered a speech, “AI is a revolution in productivity, and blockchain is a revolution in production relations. The end of AI is computing power, and the end of blockchain is also computing power. The combination of the three is a complete topic. Blockchain, a network that can be collaborated on a large scale by strangers, can be used to solve the talent needs of Hong Kong’s big model, allowing talents from all over the world to make their own contributions to Hong Kong’s big model.”

In the roundtable themed “AI+Web3: Trends and Opportunities”, the co-founder of the decentralized AI data network Masa Network said, “The data layer/distributed data collection is the biggest opportunity in the decentralized AI wave. Masa is trying to use cryptoeconomics to build a truly decentralized AI data network. Users will own their data for the first time. When their data is used to train AI models, they can get paid, which is also Masa’s vision. Decentralization and equality are also the goals that Masa has always pursued.”