Hong Kong adds four licence categories while the last regime approved 2 of 36

Christopher Hui, Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury, says the government will submit an amendment bill «within this year» covering digital asset trading, custody, advisory and management. That leaves 86 days. Hui made the same promise in January, with 350 days left to keep it.

“The government will submit an amendment bill within this year”

— Кристофер Хуэй, Секретарь по финансовым услугам и казначейству Гонконга

The scoreboard on the regime that already exists

The Stablecoins Ordinance came into force in August 2025. The HKMA took 36 applications in the first window and granted two licences on 10 April 2026, to Anchorpoint Financial and HSBC. That is 5.6% of applicants, 252 days after the law took effect.

The older regime is more generous and slower. The SFC licensed its first two virtual asset trading platforms in August 2023 and reached 13 by February 2026, which works out at roughly one platform every eleven weeks across two and a half years.

Hong Kong crypto licensing today amounts to 15 permissions in total: 13 trading platforms under the SFC and two stablecoin issuers under the HKMA. The bill adds custody, advisory and management, none of which has required a licence until now, so the register has to grow in categories nobody has counted yet. Four new categories arrive on top of that record.

Two ways a register stays short

Australia's deadline closed on 3 October with 45 applications from an estimated 400 platforms, so 355 firms did not file at all. Hong Kong's problem runs the other way: 36 firms filed for stablecoin licences and 34 of them do not have one.

Australia lost the applicants. Hong Kong kept them and said no to 34. Both end with a short register, and Hong Kong is about to run the second version across four categories at once.

Submission is not passage

The end-2026 date applies to submission, and a submitted bill still has to pass. Nothing published says when the four regimes open for applications, how long the HKMA or the SFC expects to take, or whether the stablecoin approval rate is the benchmark or the thing being fixed.

We wrote on 25 September about Cyprus, where the licensing window had closed 210 days earlier and the register stopped moving. Hong Kong keeps its windows open, and the register has moved by two.

Informational material, not investment advice. The end-2026 date covers submitting the bill, and no date has been published for when any of the four regimes opens for applications.