People building the stablecoin market in Hong Kong

Ahmed built the institutions that let Hong Kong's digital asset industry speak to its regulators. He co-founded the FinTech Association of Hong Kong and was an instrumental member for many years. He later led the blueprint published by Web3 Harbour, the industry body for the city's digital asset firms, setting out how policymakers and the private sector could work towards the same standards.

Hong Kong drafted its stablecoin ordinance through consultation, so the quality of the industry's response depended on someone having organised it first. Ahmed brought unusual technical weight to the work, having traded global markets for a decade before advising the BIS Innovation Hub in Hong Kong on tokenising carbon credits against green bonds. He has argued throughout that this depends on the reserves being real, the legal rights clear, and the claims enforceable in court.

Berenson works on the part of tokenisation that decides whether a good idea becomes a business: how it is structured, who holds what, and under which rules. Through Asia SGE he advises founders, family offices and companies on regulated Web3 activity, covering fund and trust structures, offshore vehicles, governance, compliance and cross-border growth.

He has been building that bridge in Hong Kong for years, serving on committees at the FinTech Association of Hong Kong and advising startups on commercial architecture rather than technology. His consistent position is compliance-first: that the practical questions around a tokenised asset are market infrastructure, settlement, privacy and regulation, not the chain it sits on. For stablecoins, that is the work that turns a licensed product into something an institution can actually hold.

Jiang has spent two years making an argument most of the industry had no commercial reason to support: that Asian trade settles in yen, won and yuan, and stablecoins should follow the trade rather than the dollar. Almost every regulated coin in circulation is pegged to the US dollar. She said it again at Consensus Hong Kong this February.

AxCNH is the proof. It was the first regulated stablecoin pegged to the offshore yuan, issued by the Hong Kong company AnchorX and launched at the city's Belt and Road Summit, and it runs on Conflux, the network Jiang leads in Hong Kong. Its licence comes from Kazakhstan, because Hong Kong has no route for a yuan-pegged coin. Interest has come from industry rather than crypto, with the construction equipment maker Zoomlion running test transactions in it. Agreements followed with Lenovo and the exchange ATAIX.

There is a gap between owning digital assets and being able to spend them, and Lau's job is closing it in a way ordinary users understand.

UstarPay launched its app and virtual card on 30 July 2026, letting people deposit USDT and spend it through everyday payment rails. Lau leads the commercial positioning behind a proposition the company sums up as Real Crypto, Real Life, covering the wallet, the card, the conversion layer and the APIs beneath them. He makes the case publicly too, joining Gate, Unlimit, BitGo and Sunrate on a panel in August on stablecoin rails for global trade. His background is in finance and fintech marketing rather than engineering, which is the relevant skill when the obstacle to adoption is comprehension rather than technology.

Lee has spent a decade in Hong Kong's digital asset market, and inside its licensing regime from the point one existed. He came to digital assets in 2014 after thirteen years at BNP Paribas and Macquarie, then ran sales trading for digital securities at OSL, the first platform in Hong Kong the securities regulator licensed. Gate Group recruited him in 2023 to lead Gate.HK, an exchange built specifically for the city's incoming rules, and he ran its licence application himself.

The application was later withdrawn when Gate Group reprioritised. Lee's public position did not move with it. He said Hong Kong needs a regulatory framework and that the city had the approach right, a view he has held consistently since. He went on to senior commercial roles across Gate Group before joining BingX as Chief Strategy Officer.

Maffei set out to build a licensed stablecoin issuer when Hong Kong had no licence to grant, which meant persuading established institutions to fund a company whose business model depended on a law that did not yet exist. Standard Chartered Bank, telecoms group HKT and Animoca Brands put up the backing, and the venture they formed with him, Anchorpoint Financial, spent two years preparing for a regime it could only anticipate. Anchorpoint holds licence FRS01, one of the first two Hong Kong granted.

He took the same measured approach to launching. Rather than moving straight to market with HKDAP, the Hong Kong dollar stablecoin the company was built to issue, he tested it quietly with the trading platform OSL, unwound the transfers, and opened access to institutions alone. He kept Anchorpoint out of distribution entirely, leaving licensed platforms to put HKDAP in front of businesses, and argued throughout that regulated stablecoins must support real-economy applications. In September 2026, a logistics company settled an invoice with a hospitality business in HKDAP, and the books reconciled the same day. An ordinary trade, in a currency licensed five months earlier.

Ng is going after the hardest audience in this market: people with no interest in digital assets. She runs HSBC's Hong Kong business and its retail banking and wealth arm, and is taking RedCoin into channels that already reach millions of them, PayMe and the bank's own app rather than an exchange or a new download.

Reaching them is a different problem from convincing a trading desk, and her own research shows why. When HSBC polled its customers in June, a quarter believed stablecoins were government-issued and one in ten expected them to pay interest. Ng has been plain in public that the coin pays no interest. RedCoin will launch alongside an education series on scams and redemption, and the rollout starts with payments between people and to merchants, leaving corporate use for later. Years of groundwork sit behind the caution, through the Monetary Authority's e-HKD pilot, Project Ensemble and a tokenised deposits trial, which is why she calls RedCoin a natural next step rather than a leap.

Or came to crypto from telecoms, where the job was keeping millions of ordinary customers connected and billed correctly. He spent years at Hong Kong Broadband Network in business development and corporate relationship roles, after a computer science degree at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

At DigiFinex he moved from general manager, running global operations, to chief commercial officer, and has been expanding the business across Thailand, Vietnam and Japan from a Hong Kong base. The exchange layer is where stablecoins become liquid and movable, providing the trading access, transfers and operational infrastructure that everything downstream depends on. Or's contribution is the unglamorous version of that: service, reliability and commercial discipline brought across from an industry that learned those lessons first.

Yue got Hong Kong's stablecoin law onto the books two months before the United States signed the GENIUS Act, then spent the head start on screening rather than volume. Thirty-six firms applied to his Monetary Authority. He approved two, and told legislators in February that the first licences would be few, which at the time read as expectation management and since has read as a plain description.

He has policed the boundary as visibly as he drew it, telling the market no issuer was yet licensed while offshore yuan coins were being marketed to Hong Kong investors. The regime he built runs on a principle he has repeated throughout: the same activity carries the same rules, whatever technology it runs on. Five months after he granted the first licence, an invoice settled in HKDAP, the coin that licence made possible.

Zhang went into digital asset insurance when the established market considered it uninsurable. With Alvin Kwock, formerly JPMorgan's Asia-Pacific head of emerging technology, he co-founded the insurer AIFT, then spent a decade converting its online pet insurance business into OneInfinity, which underwrites theft, custody losses and executive liability for exchanges, custodians and banks. There was no book to inherit and no precedent to price against. Business schools now teach the transition as a case study.

He reached a conclusion the market took years to share. Institutions cannot hold assets they are unable to insure, so without underwriters the sector stays small. That conviction took Zhang to the largest counterparties in Asia, including a partnership with the exchange HashKey Global covering wallets for more than a billion US dollars, and into Japanese custody alongside the US custodian BitGo. OneInfinity has since partnered with HashKey Exchange, one of the first platforms authorised to distribute HKDAP, to extend that cover to transactions in the licensed coin.