HKD Stablecoin Licensing: Hong Kong's Famous 'Coming Soon' Sticks Around Until April

Hong Kong has officially blown past its own March deadline for HKD stablecoin licensing, with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority yet to greenlight a single issuer despite fanfare suggesting rollout would begin last month. At Consensus Hong Kong in February, Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po confidently announced licenses would start dropping in March as part of the city's grand vision to become a regulated stablecoin and tokenized finance hub. Well, April is here now and the HKMA's approval inbox remains emptier than a testnet wallet with zero airdrops.

"In giving our licenses, we ensure that licensees have novel use cases, a credible and sustainable business model and strong regulatory compliance capabilities," Chan said at CoinDesk's Hong Kong conference. Bold words, zero implementations so far. That's the equivalent of announcing you're about to mint the next blue-chip NFT collection and then going silent for three months while the community slowly loses its mind.

South China Morning Post reported in March that HSBC and a joint venture between Standard Chartered and Animoca were among the expected first recipients. Both banks happen to be note-issuing banks — a designation that ties them directly to the Hong Kong dollar's issuance machinery and highlights just how seriously the territory is linking its stablecoin regime to existing monetary infrastructure. It's like letting the house run the casino, except the house has been running the casino since the Victorian era.

That infrastructure has some history. The note-issuing system traces back to 1846, when private banks started printing currency backed by silver deposits back when there was no colonial central bank to speak of. These days, each note-issuing bank deposits US dollars with the government's Exchange Fund at a fixed rate of HK$7.80 per dollar and receives Certificates of Indebtness in return — collateral for printing those banknotes. That's right, the entire HKD monetary system is running on a 7.80 peg that's older than most crypto traders' grandparents.

HKMA Chief Executive Eddie Yue drew an interesting parallel in a December 2023 blog post: pre-1935 banknotes issued by commercial banks in exchange for deposited silver were essentially "private