Two major Hong Kong-based Web3 firms, HashKey Exchange and Animoca Brands, have signed a partnership deal as cryptocurrency firms in the city move to boost a virtual asset market that is still recovering from last year’s rout.

Animoca Brands, the blockchain investment and video gaming company, will list its Sand cryptocurrency token on HashKey Exchange, the two companies said on Tuesday at an event where they signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for a strategic partnership.

Professional investors will be able to trade the token on HashKey Exchange “in a day or two”, Yat Siu, Animoca co-founder and chairman, said at the event.

Sand is the native crypto token used by Animoca’s metaverse platform The Sandbox. While it was among more than a dozen tokens named by the US Securities and Exchange Commission as an unregistered security in June last year, Hong Kong regulators have not made such statements.

Under the agreement, Animoca will also open an account on HashKey Exchange, where Animoca Brand’s trading team will trade digital assets, said Siu. HashKey Exchange, operated by HashKey Group, is one of only two virtual asset exchanges in the city that have been licensed to serve retail investors.

Both Animoca and HashKey Group are classed as unicorns – start-ups that are valued at more than US$1 billion.

HashKey Group, established in Hong Kong in 2018, raised US$1.2 billion in a Series A funding round earlier this month that gave it a pre-money valuation of US$1.2 billion, the company said.

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The two firms will also work together on offering “public education activities” about Web3, as public understanding of the term in the city is relatively “shallow” compared with many other markets, HashKey Group COO and HashKey Exchange CEO Livio Weng said at the joint signing event.

The partnership comes as crypto firms look to the future in the wake of a series of collapses in 2023, and as the launch of spot crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the US gives the industry a long-awaited boost.

Spot bitcoin ETFs offered by fund giants such as BlackRock and Fidelity pulled in billions in their first few days of trading. These ETFs allow investors to gain exposure to cryptocurrencies without having to directly buy them from cryptocurrency exchanges.

When Hong Kong approves spot crypto ETFs, regulators should consider allowing both spot bitcoin ETFs and spot ether ETFs, HashKey’s Weng said on Tuesday, noting that the city has a more “open” attitude on the issue than the US, where the topic of ether as a security is still controversial.