Hong Kong on Friday awarded 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 of the Stablecoins Ordinance, which came into effect in August 2025.
“We expect issuers to launch businesses according to their plans, explore growth opportunities while appropriately managing risks,” HKMA chief executive Eddie Yue said in an announcement on Friday.
“We hope that your promotion of regulated stablecoins will address the pain points of financial and economic activities, create values for both people and businesses, and support the healthy development of digital assets in Hong Kong.”
The HKMA assessed 36 applications and had indicated that the initial round would be limited. Finance Secretary Paul Chan said in his February budget speech that only “a small amount” 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 to be deliberate. HSBC and Standard Chartered are two of only three commercial banks allowed 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 banknote-issuing bank deposits US dollars into the government’s Exchange Fund at a fixed rate of HK$7.80 per dollar and receives Certificates of Indebtedness in return, against which it prints banknotes.
Yue drew the parallel in a December 2023 blog post.
Pre-1935 banknotes issued by commercial banks in exchange for deposited silver were a form of “private money,” Yue wrote, and stablecoins function as their blockchain-based equivalent: tokens with stable value that can serve as a medium of on-chain exchange.
A strict identity regime
The licenses come with one of the strictest KYC frameworks for digital money in the world.
According to the HKMA’s AML guidelines, licensed stablecoins can only be transferred to wallets whose identity has been verified. The travel rule applies to transfers over HK$8,000 (~$1,000).
In practice, this means that HKD stablecoins will likely build compliance checks into their smart contracts, restricting transfers to whitelisted wallets on-chain. That makes them structurally different from freely transferable tokens like USDT or USDC.
HKD CBDC takes a backseat
The bank-led stablecoin model also reflects the HKMA’s decision to deprioritize its central bank digital currency for retail use, as an 11-group pilot completed in October found the retail case was weak.
CBDCs have historically been a major topic at Hong Kong Fintech Week. Last year there was hardly any mention. Instead, stablecoins were the hot topic.
Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters said at the time that Hong Kong’s push toward 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 trade.
It remains to be seen if the market agrees.
Stablecoins are a roughly $310 billion asset class, and dollar-denominated tokens dominate almost all of it.
Data from CoinGecko shows that the largest stablecoins by market capitalization are pegged to the dollar, with no tokens pegged to the euro or yen making it to the top.
Hong Kong is betting that bank-issued, regulated HKD stablecoins can play a role in regional trade settlement, issued by the same institutions, under the same constraints, on new rails.
The question is whether a non-dollar stablecoin, no matter how strictly regulated, can generate the network effects necessary to compete.
