News, data and analysis on tokenized assets, market design and digital economic systems.
Licensing authority for Hong Kong's fiat-referenced stablecoin issuers, which granted the territory's first two licences on 10 April 2026, and operator of EnsembleTX, where tokenised money market fund trades settle in experimental tokenised deposits.
Hong Kong's central banking institution, formed on 1 April 1993 by merging the Office of the Exchange Fund with the Office of the Commissioner of Banking, responsible for currency stability under the linked exchange rate, banking supervision and the management of the Exchange Fund. It licenses fiat-referenced stablecoin issuers under the Stablecoins Ordinance and granted the first two licences on 10 April 2026, to Anchorpoint Financial Limited and The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited, both effective on announcement. Through Project Ensemble it moved from the sandbox opened in August 2024 to EnsembleTX, announced on 13 November 2025, which settles real-value tokenised money market fund transactions in experimental tokenised deposits with the interbank leg cleared through the Hong Kong dollar real-time gross settlement system and an intended path to tokenised central bank money.
Developments in which Hong Kong Monetary Authority is a named party, newest first.
Bank of China settled the two largest transactions recorded on mBridge, the multi-central-bank digital currency platform, in June and July 2026. A CNY 11.3bn payment through its Shenzhen branch was followed by a HK$10bn payment through its Fujian branch, the…
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority granted its first stablecoin issuer licences on 10 April 2026 to HSBC and to Anchorpoint Financial, a joint venture led by Standard Chartered with…
The Stablecoins Ordinance came into operation, bringing stablecoin issuance in Hong Kong under a licensing regime administered by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. The Ordinance had been gazetted on 30 May 2025 and the commencement notice fixing the 1 August date was gazetted on 6 June 2025, with transitional provisions allowing professional investors to receive specified stablecoins from unlicensed issuers under defined conditions.
The Hong Kong government published a second policy statement on digital assets structured around four workstreams it labelled LEAP: legal and regulatory streamlining, expanding tokenised products, advancing use cases and people and partnership development. It committed to regularising issuance of tokenised government bonds, clarifying the stamp duty treatment of tokenised exchange traded funds, and bringing the stablecoin issuer licensing regime into effect on 1 August 2025.
The central bank partners in Project mBridge announced that the cross-border multi-CBDC settlement platform had reached minimum viable product stage and invited further participants. The founding central banks were the Bank of Thailand, the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, the Digital Currency Institute of the People's Bank of China and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority; the Saudi Central Bank joined as a full participant and more than 26 central banks were observing members.
The Hong Kong SAR government settled an HK$800m tokenised green bond with a 365-day tenor, priced the previous day at 4.05%, on Goldman Sachs's GS DAP private blockchain platform. The HKMA's Central Moneymarkets Unit acted as clearing and settlement system, with HSBC as trustee and custodian alongside Bank of China (Hong Kong).
The Digital Currency Institute of the People's Bank of China and the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates joined the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and the Bank of Thailand in a project hosted by the BIS Innovation Hub Centre in Hong Kong to build a prototype for cross-border foreign exchange payments on distributed ledger technology. The work, which grew out of Inthanon-LionRock, targeted payment-versus-payment settlement across jurisdictions and later became known as mBridge.
What issued, what settled, what the supervisors changed, with the numbers behind it and a note on what the numbers do not show. One email, Thursday mornings.
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