Hong Kong Chief Executive's 2026 Policy Address: Improve the virtual asset licensing and tokenization framework, and promote the listing and trading of regulated stablecoins on licensed platforms.

BlockBeats news, September 17: The "Chief Executive's 2026 Policy Address" of Hong Kong, China was released yesterday, proposing that the Securities and Futures Commission promote fintech empowerment for industry upgrading, including improving the virtual asset licensing regime and formulating specific regulatory guidelines to clarify compliance pathways for virtual asset service providers; improving the regulatory framework for tokenized investment products to facilitate the issuance, trading, and launch of innovative products for tokenized products of gold and other suitable real-world assets on licensed platforms; promoting the trading of regulated stablecoins on licensed virtual asset trading platforms and their use in settling tokenized money market funds to enhance Hong Kong's competitiveness as an international digital asset hub.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority will explore more tokenized deposit applications, including collaborating with the mainland to study trade finance use cases and completing pilot transactions by the end of the year; it also plans to complete the 7×24 operating arrangements for the Ensemble central bank digital currency around the end of this year. HKEX plans to launch a tokenized warehouse receipt financing pilot in collaboration with designated banks within 2027, using physical tracking technology to enable enterprises to use commodity inventories as collateral to obtain liquidity; its blockchain multi-asset tokenization platform under development has already incorporated Core Climate listed carbon credits and plans to include LME-approved warehouse commodity warehouse receipts as a pilot next year to facilitate collateral allocation and cross-collateralization.