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Vol. I · No. 128
TheNews.TheMoneχus.
Saturday Ed.
Saturday, 18 April 2026
Updated 14:28 UTC
← back to Saturday edition
Business · Economy

Two Licences Out of Thirty-Six: How Hong Kong's Stablecoin Rollout Re-Crowned the Colonial Note-Issuing Banks

Thirty-six entities applied. Two were approved. Both already print Hong Kong dollars on paper. The 'decentralised' digital-asset frontier just got reissued to the same two banks that ran colonial Hong Kong's monetary plumbing.
By Moemedi Michael PoncanaAsia10-minute read18 Apr 2026☆ Save↗ Share⎙ Print

On Friday, 10 April 2026, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority granted the territory's first two stablecoin issuer licences under the Stablecoins Ordinance that took effect last August. The winners: The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, and Anchorpoint Financial — a joint venture between Standard Chartered, HKT, and Animoca Brands (HKMA press release, 10 April 2026). Thirty-four other applicants, including China's two largest private fintechs, were told to wait. Or told nothing at all.

Bloomberg called it a "landmark" (Bloomberg, 10 April 2026). CoinDesk, which had covered the regulator's March deadline slippage sceptically (CoinDesk, 1 April 2026), reframed the announcement as regulatory maturation. HKMA chief executive Eddie Yue published a same-day "insight" making the subtext explicit: the licensing "threshold will remain high," and "should additional licences be granted in future, the overall number will remain very limited" (HKMA Insight, 10 April 2026).

That sentence, not the press release, is the story. Hong Kong has formalised what every major jurisdiction is quietly converging on in April 2026: stablecoin rails are too important to leave to crypto-native issuers, and the "decentralised" frontier of digital money will be re-enclosed by the same banks that ran the analogue system. The ownership filter of the propaganda model applies as cleanly to a blockchain ledger as it does to a newsprint masthead.

A Licensing Funnel the Size of a Deep Well

Start with the numbers. The HKMA received 36 applications by its 30 September 2025 deadline. Two were approved — a 5.6 percent pass rate, about one-tenth of the approval rate the Federal Reserve applies to de novo bank charters in a normal year.

Who lost. By October 2025, Beijing had already instructed Ant Group and JD.com to suspend their Hong Kong stablecoin applications, with the People's Bank of China and the Cyberspace Administration of China citing concerns about "private-sector currency issuance" undermining the sovereignty of the digital yuan (The Block / FT, October 2025; Invezz, 20 October 2025). Former PBoC governor Zhou Xiaochuan told a closed-door forum that private stablecoins "could easily become vehicles for speculation or even fraud." The two largest private payment networks in the Sinosphere — Alipay with over 1.3 billion users, JD Pay with 500 million — were shown the door before the door was opened.

Who won. HSBC has issued Hong Kong dollar banknotes since 1865. Standard Chartered has done so since 1862. Between them, plus the Bank of China (Hong Kong), they print every physical HK dollar in circulation. The HKMA has just extended that three-bank cartel — minus one — into the tokenised form of the same currency.

Eddie Yue's own insight draws the parallel. "Pre-1935 banknotes issued by commercial banks in exchange for deposited silver were a form of 'private money,'" he wrote, and stablecoins are "their blockchain-based equivalent." The historical comparison is correct. It is also a quiet admission that the HKMA is regulating a 2026 technology with a pre-war colonial banking reflex: commercial-bank balance sheets, and a monetary authority keeping the franchise scarce on purpose.

The Regulatory Convergence Nobody Wants to Name

Hong Kong is not an outlier. It is the leading edge of a synchronised enclosure happening in every major jurisdiction.

In the United States, the GENIUS Act — signed into law on 18 July 2025 — requires payment-stablecoin issuers to maintain 1:1 reserves in US dollars or short-term Treasuries, and to operate either as federally chartered institutions or under a state regime the Treasury certifies as "substantially similar" to the federal one (Latham & Watkins, 2025; Consumer Finance Monitor, 14 April 2026). On 7 April 2026 the FDIC approved its own notice of proposed rulemaking under that framework (CoinDesk, 7 April 2026). The subtext is the same as Yue's: stablecoin issuance is becoming a regulated banking activity, and the issuer list will be short.

In the European Union, MiCA's stablecoin rules have been enforceable since 31 March 2025. Tether — the world's largest stablecoin issuer, with a $185.5 billion market cap as of 16 April 2026 (Bitcoin.com News, April 2026) — has still not obtained an Electronic Money Institution licence in any EU member state. Binance began delisting USDT pairs for EEA users in March 2025; daily USDT volume on EU-regulated venues is down roughly 40 percent from pre-MiCA levels (Vaultody, 2026). Circle, by contrast, holds a French EMI licence; USDC's on-chain transaction share surpassed USDT's for the first time in nearly a decade in Q1 2026 (The Block / JPMorgan, April 2026). The market is not being deregulated. It is being restructured in favour of licensed, Wall Street-adjacent incumbents.

In China, the digital yuan has crossed $2.3 trillion in cumulative transaction value, with an interest-bearing feature added at the start of 2026 (Fintech News HK / PBoC, 2026). Project mBridge — the BIS-seeded cross-border CBDC network handed off to its five participating central banks in October 2024 — has scaled to roughly $55 billion in cumulative settlement volume, with eCNY over 95 percent of flow.

Three monetary blocs, three regimes, one answer: dollar-pegged tokens go to licensed commercial banks or to Circle; HK-dollar tokens go to licensed note-issuing banks; anything beyond the dollar perimeter gets settled on central-bank rails. The rhetoric of "crypto innovation" survives. The permission-set does not.

Who Owns the Reserves

The GENIUS Act's 1:1 reserve rule and MiCA's equivalent produce a second-order effect the US Treasury cannot quite talk about plainly. Stablecoin issuers held roughly $155 billion in US Treasury bills as of October 2025, making them collectively among the largest holders of short-dated US debt globally (Kansas City Fed economic bulletin, 2025). Tether reports 63 percent of its reserves in T-bills — roughly $117 billion of its $185 billion book — with Cantor Fitzgerald holding custody of 99 percent of those Treasuries and, since late 2024, a 5 percent equity stake in Tether itself for approximately $600 million (Bloomberg, 2026; Ledger Insights, 2024). Brandon Lutnick — son of the US Commerce Secretary — is Cantor's chairman.

Put less diplomatically: the world's largest dollar-pegged stablecoin is 5 percent owned and 99 percent custodied by a primary dealer whose chairman is the child of the sitting US Commerce Secretary. Its reserves sit in the short-dated debt of the same Treasury whose secretary publicly called the stablecoin bill a "consumer protection" measure. This is what "decentralisation" looks like at the balance-sheet level in April 2026.

Standard Chartered's house research estimates that if stablecoin market cap approaches $2 trillion, the sector will generate $0.8–$1.0 trillion in fresh T-bill demand (CoinDesk / StanChart, 23 February 2026). Eighty percent of dollar-backed stablecoin flows already occur outside the United States; 99 percent of stablecoins are dollar-pegged (Atlantic Council, 2026). This is dollar hegemony re-exported on a blockchain substrate, with the bonus feature that retail users in Lagos or Buenos Aires or Istanbul buy US government debt every time they hold USDT — at a yield they do not receive.

What's Being Hidden

Three things the wire copy on Hong Kong's licensing announcement reliably elides.

First, the scarcity is the point. The HKMA is not failing to issue licences quickly. It is deliberately keeping the franchise tight because, in Yue's own phrase, "same activity, same risks, same regulation." The insight article admits in plain language that the regulator wants stablecoin issuance to look and behave like bank-note issuance — scarce, bank-balance-sheet-backed, and politically controllable. The 5.6 percent pass rate is a feature.

Second, the winners are the incumbents. HSBC, whose Hong Kong history runs continuously to 1865, now gets to migrate its banknote privilege onto-chain. Anchorpoint's Standard Chartered stake gives the other colonial-era note-issuer the same migration. Chinese fintechs — Ant, JD, Tencent's WeBank — which actually built the payments infrastructure used by more than a billion East Asian consumers, were told by Beijing to stand down and by the HKMA to wait indefinitely. The jurisdictions that matter have decided that the price of tokenised money is that only banks may print it.

Third, the market-share story is a regulatory story. USDC's gains on USDT through Q1 2026 — a 73 percent year-on-year market-cap expansion versus Tether's 36 percent — are not a consumer preference for Circle's product. They are a mechanical consequence of MiCA enforcement and the GENIUS Act's state-level carveouts (Spoted Crypto, February 2026; CoinDesk, 6 January 2026). Regulation is the revealed-preference mechanism. The "market" is the receipt.

Key Questions

What does a "private stablecoin" actually mean once only commercial banks can issue one? If HSBC's HKD stablecoin is a tokenised deposit liability, backed by HK dollars in segregated accounts at an HKMA-regulated custodian, and redeemable one-for-one within one business day — in what meaningful sense is it "private" money rather than an electronic IOU against a currency that is itself already a claim on the Exchange Fund?

Why is Washington simultaneously tightening stablecoin rules and expanding issuance to bank-adjacent actors? Because short-dated Treasury demand is the load-bearing variable. Stablecoin reserves are an off-balance-sheet bid for T-bills at a time when foreign central bank holdings are flat or declining. The GENIUS Act is a reserve-management tool dressed as consumer protection.

Who loses in the Global South? Users in economies with chronic currency instability — Argentina, Turkey, Nigeria, Venezuela — already use dollar stablecoins as a shadow dollar. Once MiCA-style and GENIUS-style rules filter down through correspondent banks and on-ramp providers, friction for those users rises sharply. The dollar does not retreat. Access to it, for the people who need it most, gets re-intermediated through KYC'd rails they often cannot reach.

Kicker

The Chomsky propaganda model's ownership filter identifies the trivial but usually unsaid fact that the people who own the means of distributing a medium end up shaping what the medium carries. The digital-asset debate spent a decade pretending the ledger had exited that gravitational field. Friday's HKMA announcement, read alongside the GENIUS Act's rollout, MiCA's de facto USDT ban, and Beijing's pre-emptive grounding of Ant and JD, settles the question.

Stablecoins are the banking system's next balance-sheet product. The front door is labelled "financial innovation." The back door — where the reserves sit — is custodied by a primary dealer whose chairman reports to Washington, or by a note-issuing bank whose charter predates the territory's last change of sovereignty. The ledger is new. The gatekeepers have run the monetary plumbing of the Anglosphere, and of colonial and post-colonial Hong Kong, for more than a century and a half.

When the technology changes and the ownership doesn't, that is not a revolution. That is a rebrand.

Sources:

Hero image: Deror avi, Hong Kong HSBC headquarters building IMG 5376, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hong_Kong_HSBC_headquarters_building_IMG_5376.JPG

Author's note: This analysis reflects the perspective of Moemedi Michael Poncana. The "decentralisation" rhetoric that accompanied a decade of stablecoin market growth has been dismantled in plain sight over the twelve months since MiCA's stablecoin phase came into force. Hong Kong's 10 April announcement is not the cause. It is the confirmation.

Sources

  • Hong Kong Monetary Authority, "Granting of stablecoin issuer licences," press release, 10 April 2026 — <https://www.hkma.gov.hk/eng/news-and-media/press-releases/2026/04/20260410-4/>
  • Hong Kong Monetary Authority, Eddie Yue, "Robust development of the regulated stablecoin ecosystem in Hong Kong," HKMA Insight, 10 April 2026 — <https://www.hkma.gov.hk/eng/news-and-media/insight/2026/04/20260410/>
  • Bloomberg, "HSBC, StanChart Get First Hong Kong Stablecoin Issuer Licenses," 10 April 2026 — <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-10/hsbc-stanchart-get-first-hong-kong-stablecoin-issuer-licenses>
  • CoinDesk, "Hong Kong hasn't issued a single HKD stablecoin license after March target," 1 April 2026 — <https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2026/04/01/hong-kong-hasn-t-issued-a-single-hkd-stablecoin-license-after-march-target>
  • CoinDesk, "Stablecoin issuers get closer to U.S. federal rules with FDIC's new proposal," 7 April 2026 — <https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2026/04/07/stablecoin-issuers-get-closer-to-u-s-federal-rules-with-fdic-s-new-proposal>
  • The Block / Financial Times, "Beijing moves to stop Chinese tech giants from issuing stablecoins in Hong Kong," October 2025 — <https://www.theblock.co/post/375210/beijing-moves-to-stop-chinese-tech-giants-from-issuing-stablecoins-in-hong-kong-ft>
  • Consumer Finance Monitor, "Treasury Issues NPRM on State Oversight of Stablecoin Issuers Under the GENIUS Act," 14 April 2026 — <https://www.consumerfinancemonitor.com/2026/04/14/treasury-issues-nprm-on-state-oversight-of-stablecoin-issuers-under-the-genius-act/>
  • Latham & Watkins, "The GENIUS Act of 2025: Stablecoin Legislation Adopted in the US" — <https://www.lw.com/en/insights/the-genius-act-of-2025-stablecoin-legislation-adopted-in-the-us>
  • Vaultody, "What MiCA Means for Tether (USDT): Delistings, Custody, and the Future of Stablecoins in the EEA," 2026 — <https://vaultody.com/blog/296-what-mica-means-for-tether-usdt-delistings-custody-and-the-future-of-stablecoins-in-the-eea>
  • Bitcoin.com News, "Stablecoin Market Crosses $320B as Tether USDT Dominance Falls 2.5% in 2026" — <https://news.bitcoin.com/stablecoin-market-crosses-320b-as-tether-usdt-dominance-falls-2-5-in-2026/>
  • The Block, "JPMorgan says Circle's USDC stablecoin outpaces Tether's USDT in onchain growth," April 2026 — <https://www.theblock.co/post/377031/jpmorgan-circle-usdc-stablecoin-tether-usdt-onchain-growth>
  • Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, "Stablecoins Could Increase Treasury Demand, but Only by Reducing Demand for Other Assets," Economic Bulletin, 2025 — <https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/economic-bulletin/stablecoins-could-increase-treasury-demand-but-only-by-reducing-demand-for-other-assets/>
  • CoinDesk / Standard Chartered, "U.S. Treasury may boost T-Bill issuance as stablecoins eye $2 trillion market cap," 23 February 2026 — <https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/02/23/u-s-treasury-may-boost-t-bill-issuance-as-stablecoins-eye-usd2-trillion-market-cap-stanchart>
  • Bloomberg, "Tether's Lutnick Ties and Hoard of Gold, Treasuries Win DC Crypto Support," 2026 — <https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-tether-usa-crypto-ambitions/>
  • Ledger Insights, "Cantor Fitzgerald invests in stablecoin issuer Tether," 2024 — <https://www.ledgerinsights.com/cantor-fitzgerald-invests-in-stablecoin-issuer-tether-report/>
  • Atlantic Council, "The stablecoin race," Geoeconomics Center, 2026 — <https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/the-stablecoin-race/>
  • Fintech News HK / PBoC data, "China's Digital Yuan Crosses US$2 Trillion in Transactions as mBridge Scales Up," 2026 — <https://fintechnews.hk/37040/fintechchina/china-digital-yuan-mbridge/>
  • BIS Working Papers No. 1270, "Stablecoins and safe asset prices" — <https://www.bis.org/publ/work1270.pdf>
  • Invezz, "Ant Group, JD.com suspend Hong Kong stablecoin plans after Beijing's directive," 20 October 2025 — <https://invezz.com/news/2025/10/20/ant-group-jd-com-suspend-hong-kong-stablecoin-plans-after-beijings-directive/>
© 2026 Monexus Media · reported from the wire