HKDAP’s Strategic Ambition: Stablecoins Are Not for Buying Coffee
Opinion | July 27, 2026
Author: David Tang, Managing Director, Standard Kepler
Originally published in STHeadline (星島頭條)
Executive Summary
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. If confirmed, HKDAP would become the first licensed HKD stablecoin to formally circulate under Hong Kong’s Stablecoin Ordinance. 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).
This report explains why HKDAP’s choice to distribute through licensed virtual asset platforms (such as HashKey Exchange and OSL Group) reveals its strategic intent—and provides a framework for evaluating any stablecoin or payment innovation.
The Five Stages of Every Transaction
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
Cash
The most primitive form: holding banknotes is authorization, checking for counterfeits is fraud screening, hand-to-hand exchange means clearing and settlement happen simultaneously, and post-transaction disputes require mutual negotiation.
Credit/Prepaid Cards
Authorization requires card numbers and CVV; fraud screening is handled by risk systems that intercept abnormal transactions in real time; clearing happens periodically as merchants batch daily transactions through acquirers and card networks; settlement occurs later when funds formally 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 (Central Clearing and Settlement System); settlement is T+2 DVP (delivery versus payment); dispute resolution covers failed trades and errors, with the rest governed by exchange rules and securities ordinances.
Stablecoins’ Two Dominant Narratives
Stablecoins, built on blockchain, have natural advantages in stages 3 (clearing) and 4 (settlement)—visibility and instant settlement are blockchain’s native characteristics.
Stage 1 (authorization) is mixed. On one hand, stolen data risks are essentially eliminated: you need not fear merchants leaking your information because your private key is never submitted, and signed transactions cannot be replayed. On the other hand, new risks emerge: private key theft and诱导 signing malicious authorizations. This is not a vulnerability—just as a homeowner losing their keys is not a lock vulnerability.
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. What happens after a problem occurs? There is no standard answer. 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).
Yat Siu’s Vision: 200 Billion Agents on the Road
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 and at scale. He predicts 200 billion AI agents will soon be in operation, negotiating, trading, and even socializing with each other.
As a blockchain entrepreneur and stablecoin company owner, his words naturally promote his own products. Whether monetary autonomy equals blockchain wallets, and whether agent payment capability must be blockchain-enabled, remain debatable. But 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.
Three Payment Types: A Classification Framework
The author proposes classifying payment forms along three dimensions: counterparty trust structure, payment frequency and amount, and delivery verification method.
Type 1: Everyday Payments
Medium-low frequency, amounts from tens to thousands of dollars, no standardized delivery verification. A HKD $900 pair of running shoes is typical. In these transactions, dispute resolution is the most important stage: what if the goods don’t match? What about counterfeits? Cryptography can prove you paid $900; it cannot prove the shoes are genuine. “Is it fake?” cannot be solved by technology—only by institutions: chargeback rules, platform arbitration. Fraud screening is equally critical; stolen card fraud happens daily and must be intercepted during payment.
Type 2: Financial Settlement
Low frequency, massive amounts—routinely millions per transaction. Primarily institution-to-institution; all counterparties are KYC/KYB-certified before entry; no strangers in the arena. Delivery verification is standardized; no additional judgment needed. This is blockchain’s main battlefield. Institutions never charge back; instant settlement actually reduces counterparty risk. Post-trade disputes are handled through negotiation or arbitration.
When assets migrate on-chain, stablecoins become even more critical. Settlement requires an on-chain HKD. This is the underlying logic of HKDAP’s B2B2C model, distributing through virtual asset platforms rather than directly to retail: its home turf is financial settlement, not convenience stores.
Type 3: High-Frequency Micropayments
High frequency, extremely small amounts—HKD $0.01 per transaction. Counterparties can be complete strangers, but the cost of being scammed once is lower than the cost of verifying information. In this scenario, fraud screening and dispute resolution can be skipped entirely.
Real-world examples: API calls. Current services are mostly prepaid, forcing them into an everyday payment model because per-transaction costs are absurdly high relative to the amount. Prepayment is the only rational design. But with mature blockchain payments, a previously non-existent market could emerge. Blockchain and stablecoins here can ignore weaknesses and amplify strengths. The only question is: how large is this market? This is where Mr. Siu’s 200 billion agent hypothesis applies.
As for agents helping you buy daily necessities or commercial procurement—these should be classified as everyday payments. AI can handle preliminary work; human confirmation of payment suffices. There is no need to reinvent the wheel just to eliminate the simplest confirmation step.
On-Chain Financial Settlement: The Invisible Back-Office Revolution
Hong Kong’s tokenized asset ecosystem faces a core contradiction: assets are tokenized, but the transaction currency is not. The result is that real-world assets are mapped on-chain, trades are matched on-chain, but clearing and settlement must run simultaneously on-chain and off-chain—adding steps rather than reducing them.
The HKMA’s Ensemble project supports tokenized deposits for interbank on-chain settlement. The gap outside banks must be filled by stablecoins. This way, the off-chain portion of RWA is reduced to asset custody and auditing; all other trade settlement happens on-chain. Assets and currency are both programmable, eliminating massive structural overhead.
A Broker’s Daily Reality
Consider a colleague’s routine: an investor sells 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, settlement begins.
Both back offices input SI instructions into CCASS—one reporting delivery, one reporting receipt. The system matches item by item: stock code, quantity, price, settlement date, account number. Any mismatch means failure, so both sides typically call to reconfirm. After matching, Broker A must ensure sufficient stock and transfer it to the settlement account; Broker B must move funds from the client account to the settlement account. Then wait for CCASS 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?
Conclusion: The Back-Office Revolution
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.
Consider this analogy: in 1995, rendering each frame of Toy Story took 45 minutes to 30 hours, with over a hundred machines computing day and night for two years. 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