You may still be waiting to buy coffee at a convenience store with stablecoins. But an upcoming compliant Hong Kong dollar stablecoin is about to remind you: the real battlefield for stablecoins is not retail consumption.
Reports indicate that Anchorpoint Financial — a joint venture of Standard Chartered (Hong Kong), HKT, and Animoca Brands — will soon launch HKDAP, a HKD-pegged stablecoin. Anchorpoint received its stablecoin issuer license from the HKMA on April 10, 2026, becoming one of only two compliant issuers in Hong Kong (the other being HSBC).
Crucially, HKDAP plans to distribute through licensed virtual asset platforms such as HashKey Exchange and OSL Group, rather than directly to retail users. This choice reveals its strategic intent.
Every transaction, large or small, passes through five stages:
- Authorization — Confirming the payer has funds and consents to pay
- Fraud Screening — Ensuring the transaction is not fraudulent
- Clearing — Calculating settlement amounts
- Settlement — Value actually transfers
- Dispute Resolution — Handling post-settlement disagreements
Credit / Prepaid Cards
Authorization requires card numbers and CVV; fraud screening is handled by risk systems; clearing happens periodically through acquirers and card networks; settlement occurs later when funds reach the merchant account; dispute resolution is the chargeback mechanism. These five stages cost 2–3% per transaction.
Hong Kong Financial Markets
Authorization is the investor's order through a broker; fraud screening is KYC at onboarding and ongoing compliance; clearing is handled by CCASS; settlement is T+2 DVP (delivery versus payment); dispute resolution covers failed trades and errors.
Stablecoins, built on blockchain, have natural advantages in stages 3 (clearing) and 4 (settlement) — visibility and instant settlement are blockchain-native characteristics.
Stage 1 (authorization) is mixed. Stolen data risks are essentially eliminated because your private key is never submitted and signed transactions cannot be replayed. But new risks emerge: private key theft and malicious authorizations.
Stage 2 (fraud screening) can only happen pre-transaction. With no intermediary, once the private key holder agrees, no one can intercept the transaction.
Stage 5 (dispute resolution) is the most problematic. On-chain settlement is final. There is no refund mechanism. Generally, the approach to disputes is: don't handle them.
Before the AI explosion, stablecoin applications were expected in cross-border payments and on-chain financial settlement. However, fraud screening and dispute resolution gaps are precisely critical in cross-border payments. Until these two points are resolved, stablecoins cannot scale in cross-border payments. After AI's arrival, the two dominant narratives became on-chain financial settlement and Agentic Payment (AI agent payments).
When discussing agents paying autonomously, one cannot ignore Yat Siu, co-founder of Animoca Brands and a flagship figure in Hong Kong's blockchain scene. Animoca holds a 37.5% stake in Anchorpoint Financial. In a Fortune interview at Singapore's SuperAI Summit, Siu asserted that AI and blockchain are inseparable: to truly empower AI, it must be given "monetary autonomy" — the ability to transact autonomously — and blockchain is the only technology that can achieve this securely at scale. He predicts 200 billion AI agents will soon be in operation.
This introduces a new payment paradigm: high-frequency micropayments. Imagine multiple agents simultaneously calling a data API priced at HKD $0.001, or paying HKD $0.01 to read a paid article. Traditional credit card models cannot support this — the transaction cost far exceeds the payment amount.
The author proposes classifying payment forms along three dimensions: counterparty trust structure, payment frequency and amount, and delivery verification method.
| Type | Frequency / Amount | Counterparty | Best Fit for Stablecoins? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Everyday Payments | Medium-low frequency, tens to thousands of HKD | Often strangers | Limited; dispute resolution and fraud screening are critical |
| Financial Settlement | Low frequency, millions+ per transaction | KYC/KYB institutions | Strong fit; instant settlement reduces counterparty risk |
| High-Frequency Micropayments | High frequency, HKD $0.01 scale | Can be strangers | Emerging fit; fraud/dispute costs exceed potential loss |
HKDAP's B2B2C model targets Type 2: financial settlement. It is not designed for coffee purchases; it is designed to settle tokenized assets and institutional transactions.
Hong Kong's tokenized-asset ecosystem faces a contradiction: assets are tokenized, but the transaction currency is not. When a tokenized asset trades on-chain but settlement runs partly off-chain, efficiency gains are eroded by reconciliation overhead.
The HKMA's Ensemble project addresses interbank settlement with tokenized deposits. The non-bank gap is the natural territory for stablecoins. If RWA issuance, trading, and settlement can occur on a single chain with a compliant on-chain HKD, the off-chain portion shrinks to custody and auditing.
A Broker's Daily Reality
Consider an investor selling Hong Kong-listed shares OTC. The seller's shares sit at Broker A; the buyer's account is at Broker B. After agreeing on price and quantity, both back offices input SI instructions into CCASS and wait for batch processing.
The same transaction on-chain: stock is a token; HKD is a token. A smart contract checks both parties' conditions; settlement is real-time. No waiting, no cut-off times. Clearing is not accelerated — it is eliminated because there are no two books to reconcile.
RWA is already on the way. What is missing is a currency on the same chain. Could that be HKDAP?
Stablecoins' significance lies in this: on-chain finance requires a compliant, on-chain, 24-hour HKD. It will not replace FPS (Faster Payment System), nor will it replace credit cards. This progress is revolutionary, but it is more like a back-office technology upgrade.
In 1995, rendering each frame of Toy Story took 45 minutes to 30 hours. In 2026, rendering the same frame takes less than a second. But your cinema experience is roughly the same. Audiences never bought tickets for rendering — just as investors never bought stocks for settlement. But the back-office revolution will quietly rewrite the entire industry's ecosystem.
Blockchain and stablecoins will follow a similar path. Three payment types, three answers. Stablecoins will first take root in financial settlement — this is why HKDAP chose virtual asset platform distribution. As for Yat Siu's 200 billion agent hypothesis, let the bullets fly for now.
The framework for evaluating any stablecoin or payment innovation: Which of the three payment types does it serve? Which stages does it improve? For the stages omitted — is that cutting corners, or were they never needed in that scenario?
Standard Kepler Research | standardkepler.com