Bitcoin (BTC) Regulation: Hong Kong's Hui Confirms End-2026 Licensing Bill in Four Categories

Four Service Categories, One Bill

Hong Kong will submit a crypto licensing amendment bill before the end of 2026, Financial Services and the Treasury Secretary Christopher Hui confirmed at a policy briefing on Monday, October 5. The commitment appears in an official government statement published the same day, which says the bill will establish a licensing framework spanning four business categories: digital asset trading platforms, custody services, advisory services and asset management. Hui framed the move as a response to “innovative developments” in financial technology. For the Bitcoin price market in Asia, it is the clearest sign yet that regulated access to digital assets in the hub will broaden rather than narrow.

The change is structural. Since June 2023, only virtual asset trading platforms have required a licence, and 11 venues, among them HashKey Exchange and OKX HK, now hold formal or provisional approval. Custody, advisory and asset management have sat in a gray zone, governed only in part by the Securities and Futures Ordinance and the Anti-Money Laundering Ordinance. The amendment bill pulls those services into a single regime supervised by the Securities and Futures Commission, mapping each category onto a familiar traditional-finance licence: platforms follow brokers, custodians follow trust companies, advisers follow investment advisers and managers follow fund managers. Read together, the four categories cover the full lifecycle of digital asset activity in the territory, allowing a fund to be managed, advised on, custodied and traded under one supervisor for the first time.

For custodians the stakes are concrete. Licensed providers will take direct responsibility for the private keys that control client wallets, an obligation previously enforced only through general securities and anti-money-laundering rules. Operators active in the three new categories without authorisation face a licence-or-exit decision once the regime takes effect.

From January Plan to October Commitment

Monday's confirmation caps a year of staged escalation. In January, Hui disclosed that regulators planned to put forward a crypto asset regulation draft before the end of 2026, and that the Hong Kong Monetary Authority had already begun processing stablecoin issuer licence applications. In April, the HKMA granted its first stablecoin issuer licences to Anchorpoint Financial, a subsidiary of HSBC, and to The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation itself. Both institutions launched Hong Kong dollar-pegged tokens, with Anchorpoint issuing HPAY and HSBC rolling out its own HKD-linked scheme.

The stablecoin track and the licensing bill are complementary halves of one policy. Where the HKMA regime governs issuers of payment tokens, the amendment bill reaches the service layer above the assets: who may hold them for clients, who may advise on them and who may run funds built around them. That service layer is where large allocations concentrate, including positions held by crypto whale accounts that today must rely on partially regulated custody arrangements.

Cost will filter the field. HashKey's chief executive said in 2023 that applying for a virtual asset trading licence cost at least tens of millions of Hong Kong dollars, roughly $5 million to $10 million, and the new categories are unlikely to carry a lower threshold. The offset is legitimacy: banks, trust companies and fund managers gain a defined compliance path for digital asset business, a structural on-ramp that could feed the next bull market. Bringing asset management into the licensed perimeter also gives tokenized real-world asset funds a legal home, a sector the government has repeatedly paired with stablecoins as a priority direction.

A Filing, Not Yet a Law

The authority here is the government's own statement, and its text stops short of enacted law: it confirms a bill will be submitted within this year, not that the four licences exist today. Under Hong Kong's legislative process, a bill of this scope typically faces six to twelve months of Legislative Council vetting and consultation, putting live operation at 2027 at the earliest and plausibly 2028. In COINOTAG's read, that gap is the signal to trade: durable institutional participation comes from regulatory clarity rather than retail FOMO, and the bill text, once tabled, is the document that decides how wide the door opens.