In late October 2025, Hong Kong’s digital asset market reached two landmark milestones, marking its formal move beyond “policy announcements” and “proofs of concept” into a deeper phase of implementation, where real-world business data would serve as the test. On October 23, HSBC officially integrated its Hong Kong dollar stablecoin, RedCoin (RCHKD), into its payment app PayMe. This meant stablecoins were no longer confined to crypto trading venues, but were directly embedded in a mainstream retail payments ecosystem with more than 3.3 million users. Just three days later, on October 26, China Asset Management (Hong Kong) partnered with Leopard Trading, a Futu affiliate, to launch the first SFC-approved tokenized money market funds available for public subscription, enabling round-the-clock secondary market trading seven days a week. These two developments addressed the two main pain points in digital asset adoption: frequent access for everyday payments and the time constraints of traditional fund trading. Together, they chart a clear path for Hong Kong’s digital financial infrastructure as it shifts from building a regulatory framework to validating a complete commercial cycle.

Looking back over the past four years, Hong Kong’s digital asset strategy has followed a carefully sequenced progression. The Policy Statement on Development of Virtual Assets, released on October 31, 2022, set the tone. This was followed by the implementation of a licensing regime for trading platforms in June 2023, and the establishment of a regulatory framework for tokenized products later that year. 2024 was a period of intensive regulatory development: in March, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority launched a sandbox for stablecoin issuers, after which Standard Chartered, Hong Kong Telecom and Animoca Brands formed the joint venture Anchorpoint Financial. In December, the Stablecoins Bill was gazetted; it was formally gazetted on May 30, 2025, and came into effect on August 1. On April 10 this year, the first stablecoin licenses were granted: just two of 36 applications were approved, reflecting the regulator’s cautious approach. Ten days later, the Securities and Futures Commission further published a framework for the secondary market in tokenized funds. These measures were not isolated; together, they laid the regulatory groundwork for products to launch in late October. It is worth noting that although licenses are scarce, the market has not stood still. Instead, differentiated strategies have accelerated real-world adoption: HSBC has leveraged its large retail customer base to move directly into consumer payments, while Anchorpoint Financial has chosen to start with B2B institutional business, connecting companies and financial institutions through authorized distributors and focusing on use cases in payments, settlements and tokenized real-world assets.

At the implementation level, the contrasting approaches of the two stablecoin issuers provide a key snapshot of the market today. HSBC’s strategy is to “monetize traffic.” After RedCoin was integrated with PayMe, users could transfer money directly to friends and family or pay at more than 100,000 merchants. HSBC also plans to support subscriptions to tokenized investment products through its mobile banking app. The advantage of this model is that it already has an established point of entry; the challenge is whether it can turn potential payment habits into regular stablecoin use. By contrast, Anchorpoint Financial’s HKDAP is pursuing a strategy of “building deep roots in specific use cases.” Since institutional trials began on August 12, HKDAP has completed end-to-end settlement testing in areas such as logistics and corporate travel. On October 16, Finloop, Anchorpoint Financial and QFPay HK completed a local payment transaction and supported the issuance of tokenized notes that can be subscribed to, redeemed and pay distributions using HKDAP. As of October 21, approximately 6.11 million HKDAP tokens were in circulation, backed by reserves of around HK$7.21 million, with cumulative transaction volume of about HK$35.1 million. Although the figures are modest in absolute terms and the product remains at the Beta Access stage, they show that HKDAP has established a recognizable business loop. Meanwhile, the around-the-clock tokenized money market fund launched by China Asset Management and Cheetah Trading has broken free from the constraints traditional funds face around trading days, valuation and settlement arrangements. Investors no longer need to wait for subscription and redemption processes; they can trade shares with other participants in real time on a licensed platform. This mechanism not only improves the efficiency of capital allocation, but also brings a broader range of participants into the market by extending the trading window, helping to create more reasonable bid-ask spreads.

Hong Kong’s digital asset market is now at a critical turning point, moving from “having licenses” to “creating value.” In the past, competition centered on who could secure regulatory approval and launch products first. Going forward, it will depend entirely on the sustainability of business models. For HSBC, the key metrics are no longer the static size of its 3.3 million-user base, but RedCoin’s turnover and retention rates in payment use cases. For Anchorpoint Financial, the key challenge is whether it can expand isolated B2B settlement cases into a high-frequency, high-retention corporate payments network, and demonstrate that stablecoins outperform traditional bank transfers in cost or efficiency. For tokenized funds, whether around-the-clock trading can generate sufficient market depth and liquidity will be crucial to determining whether they can replace some of the functions of traditional money market funds. The shift described by Secretary Christopher Hui from the “experimental stage” to the “implementation stage” is, at its core, a shift in evaluation criteria from policy compliance to the substance of financial activity. RedCoin’s payment access, HKDAP’s corporate settlement use cases and the 24-hour trading mechanism of tokenized funds now all have quantifiable business data. However, this data is not yet sufficient to prove that these business models are fully viable. Will businesses use HKDAP repeatedly? Will users choose to make stablecoins in PayMe their primary means of payment? Will around-the-clock trading genuinely improve fund liquidity efficiency? These questions require data gathered over a longer period to answer. The realization of Web3’s value in Hong Kong no longer depends on the number of press releases, but on the flow of funds these digital assets generate through real financial activity. When stablecoin turnover, tokenized fund trading depth and repeat usage of corporate payments reach a certain scale, the investment Hong Kong has made in regulation and infrastructure over the past four years can truly translate into a globally competitive advantage in digital financial infrastructure. This process is bound to be gradual and challenging, but the direction is clear: from concepts to practice, from licenses to transaction flows, and from launch to retention.

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