Hong Kong regulator adds Victory Fintech to list of approved trading platforms
The addition is the first crypto company to be licensed by the Securities and Futures Commission since June 2025, when the regulator approved Hong Kong BGE.
Hong Kong's Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) has added another company to its list of formally licensed cryptocurrency trading platforms, according to a Friday announcement.
The SFC’s list of licensed virtual asset trading platforms includes Victory Fintech Company Limited as the latest of now 12 cryptocurrency and blockchain entities on the Hong Kong regulator’s website. The addition of Victory marked the first time since June 2025 that the SFC had approved a crypto trading platform in Hong Kong.
Although Hong Kong has been known for some time as a particularly strict jurisdiction for crypto companies to operate in, authorities have been pursuing unlicensed virtual asset trading platforms as a criminal offense since June 2024. Many exchanges that had previously been operating in Hong Kong shut down, while others like OKX and Bybit withdrew their licensing applications.
In January, Hong Kong’s Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury, Christopher Hui, said regulators, including those at the SFC, were planning to submit a draft ordinance for providers offering crypto advisory services sometime in 2026. While a dozen companies are now licensed under the SFC, Hong Kong’s Monetary Authority listed no licensed stablecoin issuers as of Monday.
HK allows licensed companies to engage in crypto margin financing, perpetual trading
The addition of Victory Fintech came just a few days after Hong Kong’s SFC said it will allow licensed brokers to provide virtual asset margin financing. The securities regulator’s guidance only allows Bitcoin
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Harvard endowment reduces stake in Bitcoin ETF, adds Ether exposure
The management company behind the university’s $56.9 billion endowment opened a new position in BlackRock's spot Ether ETF, while reducing its Bitcoin ETF stake by 21%.
The Harvard Management Company, which manages the eponymous university’s endowment, has reduced its stake in BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund and opened a new position in the asset management company’s Ether ETF.
In a Friday filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Harvard’s endowment reported that it had reduced its position in the BlackRock iShares Bitcoin
Trust ETF to $265.8 million as of Dec. 31 from $442.9 million in Q3 2025. The investments marked the company offloading more than 1 million shares of the ETF, to 5.4 million in Q4 from 6.8 million in Q3.
In addition to the 21% reduction in its Bitcoin position, the Harvard Management Company reported a new investment with exposure to Ether
. According to the SEC filing, the endowment purchased more than 3.8 million shares of BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust, valued at about $87 million as of Dec. 31.
The portfolio managers’ decisions occurred during a period of significant price volatility for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The price of BTC dropped to less than $90,000 by January 2026 from more than $120,000 at the beginning of July 2025, while Ether dropped to under $3,000 from more than $4,000 in the same period.
As of June 30, 2025, Harvard reported that its endowment stood at $56.9 billion, making its investments in the BlackRock crypto ETFs 0.62% of the total assets under management. The company similarly increased its position in Google’s parent Alphabet by almost $100 million, while reducing its stake in Amazon by about $80 million in Q4 2025.
AI hedge fund backed by “top university endowments”
Harvard’s moves come as Numerai, an AI hedge fund, reported in November that it had raised $30 million in a funding round led by “top university endowments,” which the AI hedge fund described as “the smartest, most long-term allocators in the world,” without identifying specific endowments. However, the announcement pushed the price of its native NMR token up by more than 40%.
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AI-powered platform brings esports logic to the perpetual DEX market
By using onchain data, the platform structures trading into ranked 1v1 matches to create a verifiable skill hierarchy.
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AI-powered decentralized exchange Paradyze gamifies perpetual trading through ranked 1v1 “battles” and automated execution agents, aiming to transform solitary market speculation into an esports-style discipline.
Trading has been a solitary activity for most of its history. Screens, charts and decisions lived in isolation, with little context for how one trader’s performance stacked up against another. Results were private, benchmarks were vague and improvement was difficult to measure beyond personal profit and loss.
That model is starting to shift. As crypto markets mature, a new layer is emerging around competition, visibility and progression. Platforms like AI-powered perpetual decentralized exchange (DEX) Paradyze are testing what happens when trading is treated less like a private matter and more like a structured, spectator-ready discipline.
By combining ranked competition, AI-assisted execution and onchain performance tracking, the platform positions trading closer to esports than to traditional exchanges. Instead of separating execution, analytics and performance tracking across different tools, it brings them together into a single onchain environment.
Source: Paradyze
At its core, the platform combines three layers: a perpetual trading venue, a competitive performance system and an AI execution layer designed to reduce manual friction. The result is a system where trading outcomes are ranked, compared and recorded onchain.
Trading in the arena
The idea draws from familiar territory. Competitive formats have long transformed individual skill into global spectacle, a sentiment echoed by Paradyze CEO Dennis Egenrieder:
“Poker, chess and esports became global competitions once the right infrastructure existed. With over a trillion dollars in monthly perpetual trading volume, the scale is already here — Paradyze is building the competitive layer that turns trading into a true sport.”
Paradyze applies that same framework to crypto perpetuals trading, where scale already exists but structure has been missing. This approach is most visible in the platform’s 1v1 Trading Battles feature.
perpetual market, these 30-minute matches pit traders against each other under identical conditions. Outcomes are determined by profit and loss over the match period, with liquidation resulting in immediate forfeit. Performance is verifiable onchain, creating a clear win-loss record.
Perpetual trading performance becomes visible
By formalizing head-to-head competition, Paradyze addresses one of the industry’s longstanding issues: invisible trading skill. Most traders have no objective way to measure performance relative to others. Paradyze tracks results and places them in ranked environments where consistency matters as much as individual wins.
This emphasis challenges another structural incentive common across trading platforms. Many trading platforms are structurally designed to maximize fees and activity, not trader progression. Paradyze shifts attention toward outcomes and progress, encouraging participants to refine strategies over time instead of simply trading more.
To streamline the competitive experience, Paradyze incorporates an AI co-pilot and execution layer designed to minimize manual friction, standardize trade entry and exit and enable more consistent strategy deployment.”
Scaling the competition
The project has reached several milestones, including first place at the Injective AI Hackathon, over $10 million in executed trading volume, the launch of 1v1 Arenas tournaments with a $41,000 prize pool and a $25,000 Championship league.
Source: Paradyze
Alongside its competitive formats, the platform also supports standard solo perpetual trading and tokenized onchain assets including stocks, commodities and forex, allowing participants to operate both inside and outside structured matches.
Looking ahead, Paradyze plans to deepen its AI tooling, expand automation and grow its competitive ecosystem with more structured leagues and progression systems.
As perpetual markets continue to scale into the trillions in monthly volume, the DEX platform is betting that competition will define the next phase of active trading. If esports showed how infrastructure can turn play into performance, Paradyze is exploring whether trading is ready for the same transition.
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Tokenized real-world assets added 13.5% in 30 days, led by increasing activity on Ethereum, Arbitrum and Solana, even as the broader crypto market lost $1 trillion in value.
Demand for tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) continued to grow over the past month, even as broader cryptocurrency markets faced heavy selling pressure, underscoring the sector’s resilience and increasing institutional footprint.
The total value of onchain RWAs increased 13.5% over the past 30 days, according to data from RWA.xyz. The increase reflects both higher asset issuance, meaning more tokenized securities brought onto public blockchains, and growth in the number of unique wallet addresses holding these assets, signaling expanding participation.
As of Monday, all major blockchain networks tracked by RWA.xyz recorded increases in tokenized asset value, led by Ethereum, with $1.7 billion in net growth, followed by Arbitrum at $880 million and Solana at $530 million. The figures refer to the increase in total onchain value of tokenized assets issued or circulating on those networks.
Excluding stablecoins, net growth in tokenized securities such as Treasurys, private credit and other yield-bearing instruments accelerated over the past 30 days. Source: RWA.xyz.
Tokenized US Treasurys and government debt remain the largest RWA category, with more than $10 billion in outstanding onchain products. Flows into these instruments continued during the period, while tokenized stocks and exchange-traded products also posted gains.
Steady demand for tokenized RWAs points to deeper institutional participation, as asset managers increasingly use public blockchains to issue and settle tokenized versions of traditional financial products.
Tokenized money market funds, for example, are evolving beyond simple yield vehicles and are beginning to serve as collateral in certain trading and lending markets. Major institutions, including BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, have become active participants in the space.
The growth also stands in contrast to the broader cryptocurrency market, which has shed about $1 trillion in market value over the past month, highlighting the relative stability of yield-bearing tokenized assets.
The total crypto market has continued to unravel since October, with losses intensifying in January. Source: CoinGecko
Derivatives markets have been a key source of stress, with a large-scale deleveraging event in October triggering broader weakness across digital assets. Conditions have yet to fully recover, and sentiment remains fragile even as equities continue trading near record highs.
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