Hong Kong boldly stepped into the future of digital finance era. Animoca Brands, with the help of international banking giant Standard Chartered and telecom giant HKT, has formally launched Anchorpoint Financial, the first firm to be granted a license for issuing stablecoins under the city’s new regulatory environment.
This landmark is covered under Hong Kong’s May 2025 digital asset legislation, a move that backs the city’s vision to be an anchor center of regulated crypto innovation. Anchorpoint’s first product will be a stablecoin collateralised by the Hong Kong dollar that will be listed in the market in early 2026. The stablecoin will be applied for mainstream payments, property tokenised transactions, and institutional decentralised finance (DeFi) lending.
While the West debates stablecoin laws…
Hong Kong just dropped the hammer.It officially launched its stablecoin licensing regime, and it’s not playing around:
100% reserve backing
Full asset disclosures
Strict capital & audit rulesIt’s less about compliance, more… pic.twitter.com/WacKuPZRl0
— Pukerainbow (@pukerrainbrow) August 9, 2025
A New Era for Hong Kong Digital Currency
It is for the first time in history that Hong Kong-produced stablecoins will come under open government regulation. Direct token pegging to the domestic currency aims to combine blockchain’s speed of transactions with confidence and reliability of a regulated financial instrument.
This model is geared towards comforting institutional investors and average consumers who have distrusted unregulated digital currency with price fluctuation or takeover risk.
Linking Old Finance and Web3
Animoca’s vision goes much broader than creating a payment token. What is wanted is to merge the security and confidence of old-school banking with the flexibility and worldwide access of decentralised finance.
Standard Chartered’s entry provides valuable experience in cross-border settlement, risk management, and compliance—a capability that is needed in order to gain trust in a regulated environment. Zodia Markets, which the bank has an equity stake in, provides blockchain settlement technology that has been funded with $18.25 million of investment in the past. Together, they aim to bring tokenised forms of assets such as property or corporate debt onto the mainstream of finance, settling trades on-chain in seconds.
Beyond Payments: A Broader Vision
With daily payments as a first use case, Anchorpoint is already envisioning larger applications. The stablecoin will get into tokenised asset trading platforms, cross-border payment settlement infrastructures, and lending platforms in DeFi.
For multinationals, this would mean faster and less expensive settling of international trade without having to keep changing currencies. For crypto traders and institutions, it provides an institutional-grade fiat-collateralized stablecoin solution for lending protocol and investment formats.
A Warning from Ethereum’s Co-Founder
The project has caught the eye of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. While supporting growth for regulated stablecoins, Buterin has spoken about the risks of too aggressive leverage in the treasuries behind them. He warns against the trade-off of stability for high growth.
Anchorpoint will be forced to strike a balance between innovation and strong capital cushions and disclosure in an attempt to gain market trust as well as regulatory approval in the long term.
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin is warning about potential risks from companies that hold large amounts of ETH in their treasuries.
He says that if these holdings become part of an overleveraged system, a sharp price drop could trigger cascading liquidations and severely… pic.twitter.com/0J0zKsVn8h
— Benzinga (@Benzinga) August 12, 2025
Why It Matters Locally and Globally
For Hong Kong, this statement is not just about fintech; it is about making the city a hub of the next generation of financial infrastructure. To become a center like Singapore and Dubai, which has already advanced by leaps and bounds in the sector, would put Hong Kong at the center of attracting fintech startups, institutional capital, and blockchain programmers.
Internationally, it will be a test case for how regulated stablecoins can coexist with traditional banks. If it succeeds, other nations will likely be pressured to follow suit, creating a trend of standardizing stablecoin issuance and management.Â
Mixed Market Sentiment
It has come with optimistic caution. Experts in the industry are looking for a Hong Kong dollar-pegged stablecoin to be the first choice in settlement currency for Asian trading desks and crypto funds, primarily for markets that have the U.S. dollar, the yen, and the yuan interconnected.
But experts caution that unless the adoption transcends Hong Kong, the stablecoin’s potential won’t be maximized. Cross-border connectivity will become applicable while turning the stablecoin into a solution and not an instrument of localized payment.
Also Read: LayerZero Aims $110M Token-Based Stargate Acquisition
Looking Ahead to the Launch
Anchorpoint will launch pilot programmes with large companies during the latter half of 2025. The pilot programmes will test experiments in payment systems, tokenisation platforms, and cross-border settlement capability. Provided that all goes according to plan, the stablecoin will be launched to the masses during the first quarter of 2026.
The company is currently busy building the technical infrastructure, forging strategic alliances, and introducing awareness of the financial sector regarding regulated digital currency value proposition. Public information campaigns will aim to have stablecoin usage entered into consideration as seamlessly as traditional payments networks.
The Bottom Line
Animoca Brands, Standard Chartered, and HKT’s partnership is the symbol of finance, telecoms, and technology coalescence to forge the digital destiny of a city. They are setting the blueprint for how regulatory sense and financial imagination can coexist by introducing Hong Kong’s first licensed stablecoin.
If successful, this initiative will not only establish a safe, government-approved gateway to digital finance for Hong Kong residents but has the potential to be used as a model for other markets that would like to merge the safety of traditional finance with the potential of blockchain technology.
They will all now look towards Anchorpoint to see if it can deliver on its promise, innovate at speed, expand responsibly, and demonstrate to the rest of the world that a regulated stablecoin can make a success of itself in the global financial system.
