Why the real contest is no longer about crypto enthusiasm, but about payment rails, trade finance and the architecture of cross-border liquidity
The loudest reading of stablecoins is still the wrong one. They are not becoming important because cryptocurrency has finally won political respectability. They are becoming important because the major jurisdictions have begun to assign them a place within in the formal financial architecture.
In the United States, the GENIUS Act was signed into law on July 18, 2025, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) followed with a proposed implementing rule on February 25, 2026.
In Europe, Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) stablecoin provisions have applied since June 30, 2024, with the broader regime fully in force from December 30, 2024.
In Hong Kong, the decisive step came on April 10, 2026, when the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) granted the city’s first stablecoin issuer licenses to Anchorpoint Financial and HSBC. That was the moment the discussion moved beyond sandboxes, conference rhetoric and market signaling and entered the regulated core of finance.
That is why Hong Kong matters now. Not because it wants to create another crypto trading story, but because it is trying to define where stablecoins sit inside a real financial system. The city’s regime took effect on August 1, 2025. The first round of licensing was deliberately narrow: out of 36 applications, only two were approved.
One of them, Anchorpoint, is not a fringe digital-asset vehicle but a joint venture built by Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong) Limited, Hong Kong Telecom and web3 firm Animoca Brands. The other is HSBC.
The signal was unmistakable: the first stage would belong to institutions with balance sheets, distribution, compliance capacity and regulatory credibility, not to issuers trying to race ahead of supervision.
This is where Hong Kong diverges from the US and European models. The American approach is ultimately about extending US dollar power into the digital payment layer through a federal framework for private issuers. The European approach is about writing the rulebook first and forcing the market to grow within it.
Hong Kong’s approach is narrower and more strategic. It is not trying to prove ideological openness to crypto. It is trying to build a supervised interface, one that can keep access to dollar-linked liquidity through Hong Kong’s monetary system while remaining usable for China-related assets and cross-border commercial flows.
The city’s linked exchange rate system matters here. A Hong Kong dollar-denominated stablecoin does not operate outside the wider dollar universe. It operates at its edge.
That is also why the more important Hong Kong development in March was not a licensing rumor. It was the memorandum signed on March 2 by the HKMA, the Shanghai Data Bureau and the National Technology Innovation Center for Blockchain. The cooperation was framed around digitized cargo trade and finance, not token speculation.
The parties said they would study digital technology applications, examine a cross-border platform under Project Ensemble and promote work around cargo trade, trade finance and commercial data exchange.
This was a much clearer statement of direction than most market commentary on stablecoins. Hong Kong was pointing to bills of lading, logistics data, trade documentation and financing workflows. In other words, to the hard plumbing of RWA.
That distinction matters. Tokenizing an asset is not the hard part. The hard part is integrating verifiable rights, payment settlement, transferable documentation and regulatory oversight into a single executable chain of activities.
Trade finance is one of the few areas where that can happen at a meaningful scale because the underlying workflow already depends on documents, title, delivery and payment events. Once those layers can be synchronized within a supervised digital framework, RWA stops being a decorative issuance exercise and starts to become finance. Hong Kong is trying to position stablecoins inside that transition, not above it.
But none of this means Beijing has shifted its strategic priority toward private stablecoins. It has not. China’s institutional main line remains the digital renminbi. According to the State Council’s English-language website, cumulative e-CNY transactions had reached 16.7 trillion yuan (US$2.4 trillion) by the end of November 2025.
Reuters reported in March and again in April that Beijing was expanding the roster of authorized e-CNY operating banks by 12, taking the total from 10 to 22. The message is clear enough. The mainland keeps sovereign control anchored in a state-run digital currency architecture.
Hong Kong, by contrast, is being allowed to develop a different kind of instrument at the perimeter: not a challenge to the official system, but a controlled offshore interface that can connect regulated liquidity with external markets.
This is the real logic of the moment. The US wants private stablecoins to reinforce the reach of dollar finance. Europe wants legal certainty and supervisory density to define the market before it scales.
China wants monetary control to remain with the state, while Hong Kong explores a regulated channel for external capital, offshore financing and tokenized asset flows. These are not competing slogans. They are competing system designs.
So the real question is no longer who issues more stablecoins, or which jurisdiction appears more “crypto-friendly.” It is who can connect licensing, reserves, payments, data, title and redemption into a usable cross-border financial loop. That is where the next generation of market power will sit: not in narrative, not in token count, but in infrastructure.
And that is why Hong Kong’s move matters more than the market first assumed. It is not simply issuing licenses. It is trying to define a position between China’s sovereign monetary architecture and the dollar-centered international system. If that interface works, Hong Kong will not just participate in the next phase of digital finance – it will help organize it.
Jeffrey Sze is ambassador for arts, culture and tourism of Reichenau and chairman of Habsburg Asia. He serves as general partner of Archduke United LPF and Asia Empower LPF, focusing on cross-border institutional investment at the intersection of art, finance and regulated digital innovation, including AI and digital assets. In 2017, he was involved in securing one of Switzerland’s early cryptocurrency exchange licenses.
