HONG KONG — The only two firms licensed to issue Hong Kong dollar stablecoins are closing in on their launch window, with both saying their tokens arrive in the second half of 2026.
The pair emerged from a 36-applicant field. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority granted the licenses April 10, one to The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, the territory’s largest bank, and one to Anchorpoint Financial, a joint venture of Standard Chartered’s Hong Kong arm, the telecom group HKT and Animoca Brands, according to the HKMA’s announcement.
For banks watching from other jurisdictions, the round remains the template five months on. The conditions that produced a two-name pass list are the conditions a global regulator writes when it wants stablecoin issuance inside the banking perimeter, not beside it.
The other 34 applicants wait, and the second cohort they are waiting for has not been scheduled.
“The granting of stablecoin issuer licences is an important milestone for the development of digital assets in Hong Kong.”
Eddie Yue, HKMA chief executive
The regime the winners passed through
The Stablecoins Ordinance took effect Aug. 1, 2025, making fiat-referenced stablecoin issuance a regulated activity with the HKMA holding the licensing pen. A licensee needs at least HK$25 million in paid-up capital, HK$3 million in liquid capital, excess liquid resources covering a year of operating expenses and reserves backing the token at 100% in high-quality liquid assets, segregated and continuously verifiable.
Those are bank-shaped requirements, and they filtered accordingly. HK$25 million of paid-up capital is modest for a bank and prohibitive for a startup, a midpoint that admits ventures with institutional sponsors and excludes tourists. The liquid-capital floor and the 12-month expense buffer target abandonment risk, the issuer that shuts down and orphans a token, rather than insolvency.
The regulator marked the moment in the register of central-bank understatement. “The granting of stablecoin issuer licences is an important milestone for the development of digital assets in Hong Kong,” Eddie Yue, the HKMA’s chief executive, said in announcing the grants.
The process itself did some of the work. Applications closed at the end of September 2025 and decisions landed the following April. Seven months of governance interviews, reserve mechanics, wind-down planning and distribution scrutiny is diligence closer to a bank authorization than a fintech license, and applicants have described it that way.
Why these two won
The two winners answer different questions. HSBC is the establishment choice: a note-issuing institution whose balance sheet is effectively part of Hong Kong’s monetary furniture, and licensing it first anchors the regime with a tenant no critic can call flimsy.
“We look forward to participating in this pioneering regulatory regime, which will allow HSBC-issued stablecoins to be used safely and securely by our customers for payments and transactions in Hong Kong,” said Maggie Ng, HSBC’s chief executive for Hong Kong, in a statement on the grant. “Today’s news aligns with Hong Kong’s ambition to become a global digital asset hub.”
Anchorpoint is the experiment. A bank brings reserves and governance, a telecom operator brings distribution into millions of consumer relationships and merchant billing flows, and Animoca brings the on-chain economy where the token has to circulate. If HSBC’s license legitimizes the ordinance, Anchorpoint’s tests its thesis: that a regulated Hong Kong dollar token can find distribution beyond the banking hall.
The clause that reaches past the border
One feature of the ordinance travels further than the rest. The HKMA licenses not only issuance conducted in Hong Kong but the issuance of any Hong Kong dollar-pegged stablecoin anywhere in the world. An issuer in Singapore or the Caymans offering an HKD token needs Hong Kong’s permission or is, in Hong Kong’s eyes, operating illegally.
Other monetary authorities are studying that clause because it answers a question that worries every small-currency regulator: what stops an offshore issuer from privatizing your currency’s digital form? Enforcement against a determined offshore issuer is untested. The first-mover effect is real anyway, since the credible route to an HKD stablecoin now runs through Wan Chai.
A peg on a peg
The currency underneath adds a layer no other regime has. The Hong Kong dollar runs on currency-board principles, with note-issuing banks backing their issuance with U.S. dollar assets under the Linked Exchange Rate System that has anchored the currency since 1983. An HKD stablecoin is a token pegged to a currency that is itself a managed claim on dollars, with the HKMA supervising both layers.
That structure is why the regime can afford to be demanding. The territory has run credible full-backing monetary machinery for four decades and is applying a familiar discipline to a new instrument. The licensees’ reserve portfolios will look like miniature versions of the Exchange Fund.
The parallel runs deeper than analogy. HSBC is already one of the three note-issuing banks whose physical currency circulates against segregated dollar assets under HKMA oversight, so a stablecoin license extends a discipline the institution has practiced for a century rather than importing a new one. For the regulator, that continuity is the sales pitch to every other monetary authority studying the file: tokenized money supervised with the same machinery as printed money, by the same people, against the same reserve standards.
What an HKD token is actually for
The obvious objection is demand. Global stablecoin appetite is overwhelmingly for dollars, and Hong Kong’s own savers hold USDT and USDC for the same reasons Buenos Aires does.
The bank behind Anchorpoint is explicit that the target is market plumbing rather than retail savings. “The issuance of HKDAP by Anchorpoint provides a powerful regulated medium of exchange that will further the rewiring of our financial markets and help promote the next generation of international trade,” said Bill Winters, Standard Chartered’s group chief executive, in a statement, adding that combining “Hong Kong’s regulatory rigour with the efficiency of public blockchain technology” moves toward assets that are “natively digital, transparent and settled instantaneously.”
The answers the regime is betting on are institutional. Hong Kong is building a tokenized-asset marketplace, bonds and funds first, and on-chain settlement of HKD-denominated assets needs an HKD settlement leg. A licensed HKD token is also the compliance-clean bridge between the territory’s banking system and public-chain infrastructure, which the mainland’s own digital currency cannot be and offshore dollar tokens are not licensed to be.
There is a regional race underneath. The territory that licenses credible local-currency tokens first becomes the venue where Asian tokenized finance settles, and Hong Kong is running that race explicitly against Singapore.
The HKMA designed for wholesale credibility first, consumer volume later if it comes, which is the opposite of how the dollar stablecoins grew. Anchorpoint’s composition shows the intended market: not a consortium built for currency traders, but one built to put a regulated HKD token into wallets, platforms and payment flows across the territory.
Read more: OCC trust charters give stablecoin issuers a federal front door • What $309 billion in stablecoins does and doesn’t tell us
What a license permits, and what it does not
The grant is narrower than headlines suggest. A license covers the issuance of specified fiat-referenced stablecoins under conditions the HKMA attaches: reserve composition, disclosure cadence, redemption terms, distribution channels. It does not passport anywhere, and material changes, a new referenced currency, a new chain, altered reserve arrangements, go back to the regulator.
The conditions also make the tokens auditable objects from day one. Continuous reserve verification and published redemption terms are the parts of the global template most issuers grew into over years. Hong Kong’s two start there.
Nothing confines licensees to HKD-referenced tokens forever, though, since the ordinance covers fiat-referenced stablecoins generally. Whether the HKMA would countenance a Hong Kong-licensed U.S. dollar token, and how Washington’s regime would treat one, is a live 2027 question.
What the round cost the other 34
The 34 unsuccessful applicants have not been named in full, and the HKMA describes the round as a beginning. The queue itself is the market signal: three dozen institutions, reportedly spanning banks, fintechs and mainland-affiliated technology groups, decided the license justified a demanding application that required governance builds, reserve arrangements and compliance hires that do not refund.
None of the 34 has said publicly what the attempt cost, and none is likely to, since the price of a failed bank application is a number firms keep. The second-cohort question is the one their boards are actually weighing: whether to rebuild to Hong Kong’s standard or to Singapore’s.
Some of that spend converts, since a second cohort is expected and an applicant that built to the standard is most of the way to reapplying. Some of it was tuition. Either way, the round transferred a real sum from the industry to its advisers, and the willingness to pay it is the best available measure of what the market thinks an HKMA license is worth.
Two licenses out of 36 also creates scarcity, and the two licenses are now assets in their own right. The filter was tuned for consortium-backed, bank-adjacent applicants patient enough to fund a compliance organization before earning a dollar of float, and the second cohort will be read against exactly that template.
The market the tokens enter
The market is dollar-shaped. Hong Kong’s actual stablecoin activity today is dollar-denominated and offshore-issued, USDT and USDC balances on exchanges and over-the-counter desks serving the territory’s trading and treasury flows. The ordinance changes the shelf as well as the issuers: offering unlicensed fiat-referenced stablecoins to Hong Kong retail is restricted under the new regime, which pushes the unlicensed dollar tokens toward professional-only channels over time.
The licensed HKD tokens are not aimed at displacing that dollar demand. They are aimed at the settlement work beside it, and at the retail surfaces the offshore tokens are now walled off from.
The bank capital question
HSBC’s license also runs into a rulebook the fintech applicants never faced: bank prudential treatment. Basel’s standards for crypto-asset exposures decide how a bank-issued token and its reserves sit on the group balance sheet, what capital they attract and how supervisors in London and Hong Kong share the file.
None of that is public yet, and the answers will shape whether other global banks read the HSBC precedent as invitation or warning. A capital treatment that makes the token expensive to carry would confine bank issuance to marketing scale; a workable one would put every note-issuing bank in Asia on the same path.
Three regimes, three theories
The regional board clarifies the strategy. Singapore published draft legislation this month writing its own framework into statute, with full reserves, an interest ban and a recognition path for foreign-regulated tokens, and its consultation closes Oct. 16. Japan has run a bank-and-trust issuance regime since 2023 with little drama and little volume. The mainland remains closed to private stablecoins while watching Hong Kong’s experiment at arm’s length.
Same global template underneath, three theories of how to build a market: scarcity, openness and patience. Issuers now get to arbitrage them, since a group that misses Hong Kong’s next cohort can build to Singapore’s statute instead.
The e-CNY comparison clarifies what the HKD tokens are not. The digital yuan is state money for a domestic payments system, while the licensed HKD tokens are private instruments aimed at capital-markets settlement and open-network commerce. They coexist because they do not compete, and the arrangement gives Beijing a live private-stablecoin market to observe without hosting one.
How the launches might look
Neither licensee has published launch detail, but the shapes are guessable from who they are. HSBC’s obvious surfaces are institutional first: tokenized-bond settlement, corporate treasury pilots, integration with the bank’s existing digital-asset custody. Its PayMe wallet is the obvious retail channel in the territory if a consumer leg comes, though nothing of the kind is announced.
Anchorpoint’s route runs the other way, with HKT’s billing relationships supplying consumer distribution from day one and Animoca’s portfolio supplying on-chain venues where an HKD token has native work to do. Chain choices, custody arrangements and redemption interfaces are all still to come, and each will be a condition conversation with the HKMA rather than a product decision alone.
What changes now
What changes immediately is the planning environment. HKD-token projects without a license path face a legal wall rather than a gray zone, and the informal HKD-token experiments of prior years are functionally over. Banks and brokers can plan tokenized-asset products knowing a licensed settlement leg is months away rather than hypothetical, and Asian treasuries with Hong Kong entities have a new 2027 question: whether an HKMA-licensed token becomes the compliant on-chain cash leg for regional operations.
The next markers are the launches themselves and their distribution partners, the second cohort and whether it includes non-bank or mainland-affiliated issuers, and any enforcement of the long-arm clause, which would set global precedent. The one outcome none of the three Asian regimes can deliver alone is interoperability, and the first bilateral recognition between any two of them would reshape where the region’s issuers incorporate.