Hong Kong on Friday granted its first two stablecoin issuer licenses to HSBC and Anchorpoint Financial, a consortium led by Standard Chartered that includes Animoca Brands.
The approvals from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), the territory’s central bank, mark the first batch under the Stablecoins Ordinance, which took effect in August 2025.
“We look forward to issuers launching operations according to their plans, exploring growth opportunities while properly managing risks,” HKMA chief executive Eddie Yue said in a statement on Friday.
“We hope that their promotion of regulated stablecoins will solve problems in financial and economic activities, create value for individuals and businesses, and support the healthy development of digital assets in Hong Kong.”
The HKMA evaluated 36 applications and reported that the first round would be limited. Finance Secretary Paul Chan said in his February budget speech that only “a small number” would be approved, with the regulator prioritizing risk management, reserve quality and anti-money laundering controls.
The decision to license the city’s note-issuing banks appears at first to be deliberate. HSBC and Standard Chartered are two of three commercial banks licensed to print Hong Kong dollar notes, a system that dates back to 1846, when private banks began issuing currency backed by silver deposits in the absence of a colonial central bank.
Today, each note-issuing bank deposits US dollars into the government’s Exchange Fund at a fixed rate of HK$7.80 per dollar and receives debt certificates in exchange, against which it prints bank notes.
Yue made the parallel in a December 2023 blog post.
Pre-1935 banknotes issued by commercial banks in exchange for deposited money were a form of “private money,” Yue wrote, and stablecoins function like their blockchain-based equivalent — tokens with a stable value that can serve as an on-chain medium of exchange.
A strict identity regime
The licenses come with one of the world’s strictest KYC frameworks for digital money.
In accordance with the HKMA’s AML guidelines, licensed stablecoins can only be transferred to wallets with verified owners’ identities. The travel rule applies to transfers above HK$8,000 (~$1,000).
In practice, this means that HKD stablecoins will likely build compliance checks into their smart contracts, limiting transfers to on-chain whitelisted wallets. This makes them structurally different from freely transferable tokens like USDT or USDC.
A HKD CBDC takes a back seat
The bank-led stablecoin model also reflects the HKMA’s decision not to prioritize its central bank’s digital currency for retail use, as an 11-group pilot program completed in October found the case for retail trading to be weak.
CBDCs have always been a major theme of Hong Kong Fintech Week. Last year, we hardly talked about it. Instead, stablecoins were the hot topic.
Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters said at the time that Hong Kong’s push into stablecoins and tokenized deposits could “lay the foundation for a new era of digital trade settlement”, positioning them as a new medium for cross-border commerce.
It remains to be seen whether the market will agree.
Stablecoins are an approximately $310 billion asset class, and USD-denominated tokens dominate almost all of it.
Data from CoinGecko shows that the largest stablecoins by market capitalization are dollar-pegged, with no euro- or yen-pegged tokens ranking in the top ranks.
Hong Kong is betting that HKD stablecoins regulated and issued by banks can play a role in regional trade settlement, issued by the same institutions, under the same constraints, on new tracks.
The question is whether a non-dollar stablecoin, no matter how tightly regulated, can create the network effects needed to compete.
