Hong Kong Has Two Stablecoin Licences and One Live Coin

Six months ago today, Hong Kong granted its first stablecoin issuer licences. The regulator said both holders intended to "launch business in the coming few months".

One of them has. As of 7 October there was HK$6.11 million of its coin in circulation. The other announced a name.

The register has not moved

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority keeps a register of licensees under the Stablecoins Ordinance. It has two entries: Anchorpoint Financial Limited, licence FRS01, and The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, licence FRS02. Both effective 10 April 2026.

The register's last revision date is 23 April 2026. No third licence has been added in close to six months.

Anchorpoint is the joint venture of Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong), HKT and Animoca Brands, which is the same consortium that entered the regulator's stablecoin sandbox in July 2024. The two other sandbox participants, JINGDONG Coinlink Technology Hong Kong and RD InnoTech, are not on the register. HSBC, which holds the other licence, was never in the sandbox.

What HK$6.11 million looks like

Anchorpoint's coin is HKDAP, pegged at HK$1.00, and it publishes an unaudited statement of reserves every Friday for the preceding Wednesday. Eight of them are up, from 19 August to 7 October.

The series is short and worth reading in full. Circulation was HK$0.52m on 19 August, HK$0.57m a week later, HK$0.53m on 2 September, then 0.78, 1.01, 1.01 and 1.11 through the end of the month. On 7 October it was HK$6.11m.

That last step is a 5.5-fold increase in one week, and it is where most of the coin's life to date happened. The issuer also publishes gross flows: over the 30 days to 7 October it issued HK$9,083,173 and redeemed HK$3,675,086, a net change of HK$5,408,087, which puts circulation a month earlier at under HK$700,000.

The coin is in what Anchorpoint calls Beta Access, open to selected authorised distributors and their institutional and corporate users. Audited attestations are promised after full launch, with the first report date "to be announced".

The buffer is a fixed amount

The reserve figures carry something the headline number hides.

Every statement in the series reports the same overcollateralisation: HK$1.1 million, funded by the issuer itself. Not a percentage of the coin, a fixed sum. Reserves have therefore tracked circulation plus HK$1.1m at every reading.

When the coin was small, that made coverage look extraordinary: reserves were 312% of circulation in August. By 7 October, with circulation at HK$6.11m against HK$7.21m of reserves, coverage was 118%.

Both are above full backing, which is what the rules require. But the direction is one way, and a reader comparing the August and October statements without doing the division would see a reserve pile growing and miss that the cushion over the liability has not grown at all.

The other licensee

HSBC named its coin on 30 September. HSBC RedCoin, described by the bank as forthcoming, with a survey of more than a thousand Hong Kong customers attached and a phased rollout planned from person-to-person and merchant payments toward corporate and institutional use.

The release gives no launch date. Six months after the licence, the public artefact is a brand.

Why a payments team should care

Two readings for anyone building on Hong Kong's regime.

The first is scale. The entire licensed stablecoin float in Hong Kong is HK$6.11 million, held in a beta programme restricted to institutional users of selected distributors. Anyone planning settlement volume on regulated Hong Kong stablecoins today is planning against a market that does not exist yet at that size.

The second is that the disclosure is unusually good. A weekly statement, a published circulation figure, gross issuance and redemption, and an explicit note on who funds the buffer is more than most stablecoins anywhere disclose. It is also what makes the arithmetic above possible.

What this is not

The circulation and reserve figures are the issuer's own and unaudited. Anchorpoint says audited attestations will begin after full launch, and no attestation has been published yet.

The weekly reports changed their stated cut-off time between 30 September and 7 October, from 5:00 p.m. to 11:59 p.m. Hong Kong time. That is the same week as the jump in circulation. HaiPay is not suggesting the two are connected, only that both appear in the record.

The transparency page shows a transaction volume figure of 19,000,000 without stating a period. It is not used in this article.

HaiPay found no stablecoin issued by HSBC and no launch date for one, but a negative like that rests on public sources; the bank's own description of RedCoin as forthcoming is the fact being relied on.

HaiPay did not contact the HKMA, Anchorpoint, HSBC or any sandbox participant.

What to watch

Whether a third licence appears. The register has been unchanged since April, and the sandbox cohort has two members who never converted.

Whether the HK$1.1 million buffer moves. If circulation keeps growing at October's rate and the buffer stays fixed, coverage falls toward 100%, which is the floor the rules set rather than a margin.

And whether HSBC puts a date on RedCoin. Six months of "forthcoming" is a long time for a licensed issuer in a two-name market.