Last year’s market crash has been blamed on the bursting of a bubble in initial coin offerings, a largely unregulated crowdfunding method involving digital money, as well as the bitcoin cash “hard fork”, which led to a split in the fourth largest cryptocurrency into two separate entities due to fundamental disagreements among its developers.

The cryptocurrency crunch has begun to bite, leading enterprises like Bitmain, the world’s biggest maker of specialised computers used for creating new units of digital money, and Switzerland-based software production studio ConsenSys to announce plans for lay-offs.

“Hong Kong is one of the easiest markets for reverse IPOs, because there are many small-cap stocks,” said Xiao Lei, a cryptocurrency analyst with Beijing-based research firm Symbt, on the recent back-door listing initiatives.

Xiao said the cryptocurrency exchanges are more likely to inject their blockchain technical services, not their trading businesses, into the publicly traded shell companies, given the Hong Kong exchange’s strict policies around digital assets.

“It did not go well for hardware manufacturers like Bitmain to go public, what more for companies directly dealing with cryptocurrency trades,” he said.