Floki Inu, a meme coin on Ethereum and Binance’s BNB Chain, has suspended its staking program in Hong Kong after it was listed as a “suspicious investment product” by the city’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC).
The staking program of TokenFi, Floki’s asset tokenization platform, was also called “suspicious” in the regulator’s Jan. 26 announcement.
“The Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) today warned the public of suspicious investment products named “Floki Staking Program” and “TokenFi Staking Program”, both of which involve cryptocurrency staking services and claim to offer high annualised return targets of 30% to over 100%,” the SFC said.
Hong Kong’s securities watchdog added that it did not authorize the two products to be offered to the Hong Kong public.
“Instead of raising tens of millions of dollars in VC funds and/or doing a huge presale prior to launch, which would have resulted in VCs and presale buyers getting most of the token supply, we opted not to raise funds from VCs or do a presale,” the Floki team responded in a blog post. “Instead, the majority of the TokenFi token’s supply was allocated to users who stake FLOKI — in line with Floki’s ethos as the people’s cryptocurrency.”
Floki’s market capitalization of over US$290 ranks it as the 188th largest cryptocurrency in the world. It traded for US$0.00002921 at the time of writing. TokenFi changed hands for US$0.02698 with a market cap of US$30.68 million, according to CoinGecko data.