The Hong Kong Monetary Authority on April 10 granted the territory's first two stablecoin issuer licenses — to HSBC and Anchorpoint Financial, a joint venture of Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong), HKT, and Animoca Brands. The approvals came eight months after the Stablecoins Ordinance took effe...
"The licensing threshold will remain high. The need for user protection, and considerations of market capacity and sustainable development mean the overall number will remain very limited." — Eddie Yue, Chief Executive, Hong Kong Monetary Authority
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority on April 10 granted the territory's first two stablecoin issuer licenses — to HSBC and Anchorpoint Financial, a joint venture of Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong), HKT, and Animoca Brands. The approvals came eight months after the Stablecoins Ordinance took effect on August 1, 2025, from a pool of 36 formal applications, yielding a 5.6% approval rate. Both licensees plan to issue Hong Kong dollar-pegged stablecoins: HSBC targets the second half of 2026 via integration into its 3.3-million-user PayMe platform, while Anchorpoint aims to launch its "HKDAP" (HKD At Par) token from Q2 2026 through B2B2C distribution.
Eighteen days later, on April 28, the HKMA issued a public warning: fraudulent tokens using the tickers "HKDAP" and "HSBC" had appeared on-chain. Neither licensee had launched. The fake tokens arrived before the real ones. This sequence — regulatory milestone followed immediately by a fraud vector — illustrates the structural tension in building a regulated non-USD stablecoin market inside a $320-billion ecosystem where 99% of supply is denominated in U.S. dollars.
The HKMA's first licensing round under the Stablecoins Ordinance closed its application window on September 30, 2025. Thirty-six entities submitted formal applications. The six-month review assessed risk management capability, reserve quality, anti-money-laundering controls, and the viability of proposed use cases. Two licenses were granted.
The selection of HSBC and a Standard Chartered-led consortium signals that Hong Kong is anchoring its stablecoin regime to incumbent banking infrastructure rather than crypto-native issuers. Both entities already operate under existing banking supervision — HSBC as a licensed bank, Anchorpoint as a subsidiary of Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong) Limited. This contrasts with jurisdictions like the U.S., where non-bank entities (Tether, Circle) dominate stablecoin issuance.
The 5.6% approval rate ranks among the most restrictive initial licensing rounds in any stablecoin regime globally. By comparison, Singapore's Payment Services Act framework had approved six to eight stablecoin operators by January 2026 under its Stablecoin Circularity Scheme, with StraitsX accumulating $1.8 billion in cumulative transaction volume.
HSBC plans to launch an HKD-denominated stablecoin in H2 2026 with three initial use cases:
Each stablecoin will be fully backed by high-quality, liquid assets held in segregated accounts, per HSBC's April 10 announcement.
Anchorpoint Financial (Standard Chartered 51%, HKT and Animoca Brands as minority shareholders) targets a phased launch starting Q2 2026. Its HKD At Par (HKDAP) stablecoin will focus on B2B2C distribution through authorized partners, leveraging HKT's telecommunications customer base and Animoca's Web3 infrastructure. Standard Chartered's existing correspondent banking network provides the cross-border settlement layer.
The HKMA identified four strategic priority use cases for the licensed stablecoins: cross-border payments leveraging global bank networks, local payments within Hong Kong, tokenized asset trading with real-time on-chain settlement, and conditional payments including supply chain financing.
On April 28 — less than three weeks after the licenses were granted and before either licensee had issued a single token — the HKMA published a public alert. Tokens bearing the tickers "HKDAP" and "HSBC" had appeared on-chain. The authority confirmed that both licensed issuers verified they "have not issued any regulated stablecoins in the market."
According to CoinDesk reporting on April 29, the legitimate Hong Kong dollar stablecoins are not expected to launch until the city's fintech week in November 2026, pending completion of system testing, operational setup, and compliance checks. The gap between license announcement and product launch created a window for fraudulent activity.
The HKMA urged the public to "stay vigilant against fraudulent activities or scams" and to acquire stablecoins only through regulated channels. A follow-up scam alert on April 29 extended the warning to bank-related fraud more broadly.
This pattern is not unique to Hong Kong. It mirrors the broader challenge facing any jurisdiction that announces a regulatory framework before products are live: the regulatory signal itself generates speculative interest that bad actors exploit. The question of who bears the cost of this information asymmetry — the regulator, the licensees, or the retail users — remains unresolved.
The Stablecoins Ordinance imposes requirements that exceed most existing frameworks:
The interest prohibition is notable. It prevents HKD stablecoins from competing on yield — a primary driver of growth for yield-bearing stablecoin products, which accounted for over 50% of net stablecoin supply growth in Q1 2026 according to Stablecoin Insider's quarterly report. Products like sUSDS added $2.5 billion in a single quarter. Hong Kong's licensed stablecoins cannot participate in this category.
Hong Kong is one node in a broader Asian regulatory push to establish local-currency stablecoins. The competitive landscape:
Japan was first to legislate, revising its Payment Services Act (effective June 2023) to permit only licensed banks and trust companies to issue yen-pegged stablecoins. JPYC launched in October 2025 as the first FSA-regulated private yen stablecoin. Japan's three megabanks — MUFG, SMBC, and Mizuho — are developing joint blockchain infrastructure for yen-denominated digital settlement. Up to 50% of reserves may be invested in low-risk assets including Japanese or U.S. government bonds with residual maturity of three months or less.
Singapore operates the most mature framework. Six to eight stablecoin operators were active as of January 2026. StraitsX's XSGD (Singapore dollar-pegged, launched 2020) has accumulated $1.8 billion in cumulative transaction volume. The MAS permits stablecoins pegged to SGD, USD, and other G10 currencies.
South Korea has no dedicated stablecoin legislation, with Phase 2 regulatory work ongoing. Pre-regulatory projects like KRWQ exceeded KRW 1 billion ($740,000) in trading volume within one month of launch.
China maintains a complete ban on private stablecoins, including explicit prohibition of offshore yuan-pegged issuance. The digital yuan (e-CNY) remains the only sanctioned digital currency.
Israel approved its first regulated shekel stablecoin (BILS) on Solana in late April 2026, adding another non-USD entry to the field.
The structural challenge for every non-USD stablecoin project is arithmetically stark. As of Q1 2026:
The Tiger Research 2026 Asia Stablecoin Market Overview summarized the problem: "The dollar is a sports car in the next lane, running at full speed. No matter how well the road is built, it means nothing if there is no vehicle to put on it."
Stablecoin issuers collectively rank as the 17th-largest holder of U.S. government debt worldwide. This creates a self-reinforcing loop: USD stablecoins are backed by U.S. Treasuries, which generates yield for issuers, which funds growth, which increases demand for more Treasuries. Non-USD stablecoins backed by local government bonds in smaller sovereign debt markets cannot replicate this flywheel at comparable scale.
Q1 2026 data compounds the challenge. Total stablecoin transaction volume hit $28 trillion, a 51% quarter-over-quarter increase. But retail transfers declined 16% — the steepest single-quarter drop on record. Bot-driven volume accounted for 76% of activity, the highest in two years. Organic volume increasingly flows to USDC, which captured approximately 80% of organic volume for the first time since 2019. The market is growing, but the growth is concentrating in USD-denominated rails.
The economic value flowing through stablecoin issuance accrues primarily to issuers and their reserve managers, not to end users. Under Hong Kong's interest prohibition, HSBC and Anchorpoint will earn yield on their 100%-backed reserves — parked in HKD cash, short-term government bonds, or equivalent high-quality liquid assets — while stablecoin holders receive zero interest. This mirrors the traditional banking model of net interest margin extraction, transplanted onto blockchain rails.
For Hong Kong's framework to generate durable economic value beyond issuer profit, the stablecoins must reduce actual transaction costs or settlement times compared to existing domestic payment infrastructure. Hong Kong already operates the Faster Payment System (FPS), which processes real-time HKD and RMB transfers at zero cost to consumers. The value proposition of an HKD stablecoin for domestic peer-to-peer payments, against a zero-cost incumbent system, is unclear. The more plausible value capture lies in cross-border payments, tokenized asset settlement, and programmable conditional payments — use cases where existing infrastructure remains slow or expensive.
Hong Kong has built a technically rigorous stablecoin regime. The reserve requirements are strict. The approval rate is conservative. The licensees are systemically important banks. But the territory enters a market where the network effects of USD stablecoins are near-monopolistic, where yield-bearing products drive the majority of new supply growth (a category HKD stablecoins cannot enter), and where fraudsters moved faster than the regulated issuers.
The question is not whether Hong Kong can regulate stablecoins — it clearly can. The question is whether regulated, non-interest-bearing, local-currency stablecoins can capture meaningful economic activity in a market structurally dominated by USD instruments. Japan, Singapore, and now Hong Kong are running parallel experiments. So far, the data does not favor the challengers.