Anchorpoint Launches HKDAP, Hong Kong's First Regulated HKD Stablecoin

Hong Kong's first regulated local-currency stablecoin is live. Anchorpoint, the joint venture of Standard Chartered, Animoca Brands and HKT, began rolling out HKDAP on Wednesday, CoinDesk and The Block reported, the first Hong Kong dollar token issued under the city's stablecoin-issuer regime. A stablecoin is a token built to hold a fixed value against a reference currency, and until Wednesday every licensed launch question in the city was hypothetical. The start is deliberately narrow. HKDAP goes first to institutional and professional investors, distributed through HashKey Exchange and OSL, with retail access targeted for late 2026.

Institutions before retail

The token is fiat-backed one to one against the Hong Kong dollar, meaning the issuer holds HKD reserves matching the tokens in circulation, and it is held to the Hong Kong Monetary Authority's capital, reserve and governance standards for licensed issuers. TechTimes reported that HKDAP runs on Ethereum; we did not find the chain named in the other launch coverage checked on Wednesday, so that detail rests on one outlet for now. The distribution list stays inside the regulated perimeter. HashKey Exchange and OSL are licensed venues, and the phased rollout mirrors how the city has sequenced crypto access generally, professionals first and retail later, the same pattern behind July's first licensed-broker BNB listing.

A framework a year in force

The legal groundwork predates the token by a year. Hong Kong's stablecoin-issuer framework took effect on 1 August 2025, and the first two issuer licenses followed only in April 2026. Anchorpoint held one of them. The other went to an issuer linked to HSBC, which is preparing its own launch for the second half of 2026. If that schedule holds, the city's first two regulated HKD stablecoins will arrive within months of each other, one from a bank-led consortium and one from a bank. Wednesday's launch is the first of the pair to reach the market, a year after the rules it operates under came into force.

The market it enters

Coverage of the launch put the global stablecoin market near $287 billion. Late-July tallies had it close to $300 billion. The two figures come from different trackers and do not reconcile exactly; both make the same broad point about scale. That market skews overwhelmingly toward US-dollar tokens, and it has also just shrunk, with total supply recording its first contraction in four years in July. HKDAP is one of the first regulated tests of institutional demand for a unit pegged to something other than the dollar.

Three dates now frame the experiment. The HSBC-linked issuer's launch is penciled for the second half of 2026. Anchorpoint's retail phase is targeted for late 2026. And the framework both operate under has its own track record accruing from Wednesday onward, in reserves reported and redemptions honored. What Wednesday settled is the narrow question of whether a licensed HKD stablecoin would ship at all. It did, with a bank, a telecom and a web3 investor behind it, and with its first buyers restricted to the institutions the regime was built to reassure. How much demand those institutions show, through two licensed exchanges and against a market of dollar incumbents, is the number to watch when Anchorpoint first reports circulation.