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Hong Kong Web3 PR Playbook: SFC VASP, Forkast, and the China-Bridge Narrative
If you're choosing between domiciling in Hong Kong and Singapore, the PR strategy is different depending on which you pick. Not "somewhat different." Structurally different. The media landscape, the story frame, and the journalists who'll actually take your call are three separate decisions, and they don't overlap cleanly between the two cities.
Hong Kong has pulled ahead of Singapore in attracting crypto treasury companies and Web3 HQ relocations, with multiple blockchain experts pointing to its regulatory stack as the primary pull factor. The SFC's VASP licensing regime has been operating since 2023. The Stablecoins Ordinance came into force on 1 August 2025. The ASPIRe roadmap, published at Consensus 2025, laid out a 12-initiative framework across five pillars — Access, Safeguards, Products, Infrastructure, and Relationships — covering custody, OTC, staking, and professional-investor token listings. No other APAC jurisdiction has published anything that specific.
That regulatory stack creates a distinct earned-media opportunity. It's compliance-forward, institutional-facing, and explicitly positions Hong Kong as a bridge to Greater China markets. That's a PR angle Singapore, Dubai, and Tokyo can't replicate.
I was on the ground in Hong Kong for DePIN Day in March 2025, working on coverage for Fluence and Titan Network, and the energy in the room was not the general "crypto is back" vibes of 2021. It was infrastructure executives, compliance lawyers, and family office capital. That tells you what story you need to be pitching.
Why the Hong Kong media landscape is not just "APAC tier-2"
The most common mistake founders make is treating Hong Kong as a regional supplement to a Singapore-first PR plan. It's not. The Hong Kong press ecosystem serves a completely different reader and serves a completely different function in the capital formation chain.
South China Morning Post (SCMP) is not a crypto publication. It's one of Asia's most-read English-language newspapers of record, with a fintech and blockchain desk that covers regulatory and institutional angles. A SCMP placement is read by Hong Kong-domiciled family offices, traditional finance executives, and the government officials who attend FinTech Week. It's not the same reader as someone who found your CoinTelegraph piece through a Twitter repost. SCMP's blockchain reporter Matt Haldane has covered Consensus HK extensively, and the paper's Xinmei Shen has been the go-to byline for Hong Kong regulatory scoops. These are journalists who care about the SFC circular that dropped last Tuesday, not about your TGE narrative.
Forkast is the essential Hong Kong-HQ English-language crypto outlet. Founded in 2018 by former Bloomberg anchor Angie Lau, it focuses on blockchain, cryptocurrency, and emerging technologies from an APAC perspective, and it's specifically designed to bridge Asian market intelligence to a global audience. Placement in Forkast signals to international institutional readers that your project is serious about the Hong Kong market. It's also frequently cited by other outlets covering the Asia angle — if Forkast has your story, Reuters and Bloomberg's Asia desks notice.
Then there's the Chinese-language press, and this is where most non-Chinese founders get it badly wrong.
Direct Mainland China coverage is essentially closed to non-Chinese projects. The accessible Chinese-language crypto press sits in Hong Kong and Singapore, writing for a Mandarin-reading global diaspora. ChainCatcher, PANews, TechFlow, Jinse, and Blocktempo are the five outlets that matter most for this diaspora reach. ChainCatcher has over 1.2 million users and 1.8 billion total views, and it has hosted 60+ events in Singapore, Korea, Vietnam, and Hong Kong. PANews is based in Hong Kong, founded in 2018, covers Web3 in both Chinese and English, and targets entrepreneurs and institutional participants across Asia-Pacific. Jinse operates as a cross-border hub, blending mainland Chinese readership with Hong Kong's global-facing editorial openness.
These outlets are not niche. They are the primary source of record for Mandarin-reading Web3 investors and professionals globally, and they run active on-the-ground programs in Hong Kong. If your project has VASP licensing or a stablecoin angle, ChainCatcher will want to write about it. The story writes itself in Chinese-language media: a compliance-backed Western project bridging into Greater China capital.
What the SFC's regulatory stack actually gives you as a PR narrative
The ASPIRe roadmap is a gift to anyone who knows how to use it for media. The SFC published a five-pillar framework that does the work of framing your narrative for you — if you're positioned correctly to sit inside it.
Pillar A (Access) covers new licensing frameworks for OTC trading and custody services. If your protocol is building custody infrastructure or an OTC desk aimed at the institutional Hong Kong market, you're not just a Web3 startup anymore. You're a regulated financial services provider in one of the world's most credible jurisdictions. That's a completely different pitch to a SCMP financial services editor than "we're a DeFi protocol."
Pillar P (Products) includes staking — the SFC and HKMA issued guidance on 7 April 2025 allowing licensed VATPs to offer staking services. If you're a protocol where staking is a product, that guidance is a newsjacking hook. You can write an op-ed for CoinDesk or Decrypt's Asia desk: "What the SFC's staking circular means for DeFi yield products."
The Stablecoins Ordinance is the biggest single news hook in the Hong Kong stack right now. It came into force on 1 August 2025. The HKMA had received 36 applications by end of September 2025, and the first two licences — to Anchorpoint and HSBC — were granted in April 2026. If you're building anything touching payments, stablecoin infrastructure, or cross-border settlement, you have months of press hooks as that licensing pipeline runs.
The frame that lands in SCMP and Forkast: Hong Kong as the "regulatory sandbox" for institutional crypto that Mainland China will eventually watch and potentially adopt. Analysts and regulatory commentators have made this observation explicitly. Your PR angle is not "we're compliant." It's "we're building in the jurisdiction that will define the institutional standard for Greater China crypto."
How to build the media strategy in practice
Tier 1 (English-language institutional): SCMP fintech desk, Forkast, CoinDesk Asia, The Block, Bloomberg Crypto. These outlets respond to regulatory announcements, funding news with institutional names attached, and expert commentary from founders who have something concrete to say about SFC policy. If your founder can write a 700-word op-ed on what the OTC dealer consultation means for institutional liquidity, Forkast will run it.
Tier 2 (English-language crypto trade): Cointelegraph, Decrypt (Asia desk), Blockworks, Bitcoin Magazine. These are the same outlets you'd pitch from Singapore, but the angle needs to land differently. In Hong Kong, lead with the regulatory frame before the product story. These reporters have covered thirty TGE narratives this quarter. The SFC custody regime is fresh air.
Tier 3 (Chinese-language diaspora): ChainCatcher, PANews, TechFlow, Jinse, Blocktempo. I've secured Chinese pickups across ChainCatcher, TechFlow, Jinse, PANews, and Blocktempo for clients running DePIN announcements out of Hong Kong. The Chinese-language press responds to localised, Mandarin-written press releases far more reliably than to English materials with a translation note. They also respond to in-person event presence — if your team is at the Hong Kong Web3 Festival or FinTech Week, show up to ChainCatcher's side events. These outlets run their own community programs and they're accessible on the ground.
A useful frame for the Chinese-language tier: think of it as two-wave PR. Wave 1 is English coverage in SCMP or Forkast. Wave 2 is ChainCatcher and PANews picking that up and writing their own angle for the Mandarin-reading audience. That second wave is not guaranteed from a press release. It's accelerated by having the English coverage to point to, plus a direct relationship with an editor at each outlet.
What makes a Hong Kong pitch land vs. get ignored
A few patterns I've seen work and fail, across multiple client campaigns:
What lands: Regulatory alignment as the lede. "We just received our VASP licence" or "our custody structure is being designed to meet the SFC's ASPIRe custody framework" — this is the kind of sentence that earns a reply from a SCMP fintech editor. It signals you understand the city's agenda.
What lands: The Greater China bridge angle. Mainland Chinese capital flows into Hong Kong-domiciled vehicles. Anything that positions your project as the compliant on-ramp for Greater China institutional capital — RWA tokenisation, fund administration, stablecoin settlement for cross-border trade — is a story these outlets are actively trying to tell.
What gets ignored: Generic "we're expanding to Asia" language. Every Western project says this. It means nothing in Hong Kong specifically. "We're expanding to Asia" is not a Hong Kong story. "We're applying for a VASP licence and positioning as the first SFC-regulated custody layer for Ethereum restaking" is a Hong Kong story.
What gets ignored: Treating the Chinese-language outlets as a translation exercise. ChainCatcher and PANews are not wire services waiting to repackage your English press release. They have editorial standards and they write original analysis. Pitch them with a localized hook and a Mandarin-language version of the release. If you send them an English PDF with a note that says "please translate," they won't run it.
The pitfall no one warns you about: SCMP and Forkast are both read closely by the SFC's communications team. A story that misrepresents the regulatory framework, claims a licence that hasn't been granted, or uses language that implies SFC endorsement where none exists can create a compliance problem, not just a PR problem. I've seen projects burn a SCMP relationship by over-claiming regulatory status. Check every compliance claim in your press materials with your Hong Kong legal counsel before you pitch.
What this looks like at different stages
Pre-seed / seed: You don't have a VASP licence and you don't need to pretend you do. The Hong Kong story at this stage is ecosystem positioning — attending events, getting your founder quoted as a commentary source on SFC announcements, publishing op-eds on Forkast about what the ASPIRe roadmap means for your category. Build the relationship with the Forkast editorial team before you have a product announcement. When your Series A drops, they'll already know who you are.
Series A / token launch: This is when the VASP narrative is most powerful. If you can time your announcement with an SFC policy moment — a new consultation, a licensing batch announcement — you have a natural news hook that lets you attach your story to something editors are already covering. Embargo your funding news to SCMP and Forkast simultaneously, 72 hours before the lift. Give each a slightly different angle: SCMP gets the institutional/regulatory frame, Forkast gets the product and technology detail.
Post-TGE / growth stage: Now the Chinese-language press becomes critical. ChainCatcher and PANews are the outlets that will drive the Mandarin-speaking investor and developer communities to your ecosystem. At this stage you want monthly presence in the Chinese-language tier, not one-off press releases.
The APAC localisation reality
When I led APAC at CoinMarketCap, one of the clearest patterns I saw was this: projects that treated Hong Kong as a box to check ("we got one Forkast placement, done") never built the sustained presence that converted into real capital or partnerships. Projects that understood the two-layer strategy — English institutional tier plus Chinese-language diaspora tier, running in parallel, both with locally relevant hooks — built reputations that outlasted individual announcements.
Hong Kong is not Singapore. It's not Dubai. It's the one APAC jurisdiction where compliance credibility is the story, not a footnote to the story. The founders who get that early are the ones who land in SCMP's fintech section instead of being passed over for the fifth time.
If you're building out your Hong Kong PR plan and you want a second opinion on the narrative and outlet strategy, book a 30-minute teardown and I'll tell you exactly what's working in this market right now.
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