HSBC's Redcoin Tops 50,000 Users in First Week of Hong Kong Rollout

HSBC Routes Redcoin Through PayMe

HSBC built Redcoin to move Hong Kong dollars between people and merchants as a token, and in roughly its first week on the market the stablecoin has passed 50,000 users. HSBC Group CEO Georges Elhedery set out the figure at Hong Kong Fintech Week on Monday, presenting the pegged token as a payments instrument rather than a trading asset. He credited the regulatory environment put in place by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) with giving the rollout room to grow, saying the result shows a service of this kind can scale to a very large size where the technology is solid, secure and the rules support it. Distribution runs through HSBC's own payment stack for now. Redcoin's initial channel is PayMe, the bank's mobile payment app, which reaches about 3.3 million users and some 100,000 merchants across Hong Kong and handles both merchant payments and person-to-person transfers. HSBC Hong Kong CEO Maggie Ng said merchant payment and wallet top-up functions are already operating, and that the bank is encouraged by the early customer usage the launch has produced. Elhedery put the ambition plainly: the goal is millions of users. The bank's stated plan is to extend Redcoin through its general banking apps as well, and then to build on the token, turning it into the access layer for tokenized investment products. That would carry Redcoin past checkout and transfers into savings and investment territory, with the token settling the payments underneath. The milestone lands in the initial phase of the service, before any integration with the bank's broader apps has begun. For HSBC, the week-one number is evidence that the use case it designed Redcoin for, paying at merchants and moving money between people, is the one customers are actually performing.

Anchorpoint Bets on Solana

HSBC is not the only licensed issuer in Hong Kong's stablecoin market. The HKMA has approved exactly two issuers of Hong Kong dollar stablecoins: HSBC itself and Anchorpoint, the consortium led by Standard Chartered. Anchorpoint's token, HKDAP, is headed down a different path. The consortium has agreed to issue and redeem HKDAP directly on Solana (SOL), the high-throughput altcoin network, under a strategic partnership with the Solana Foundation. Issuing and redeeming are the mint and burn sides of a stablecoin's life cycle; placing them on a public chain opens a route to HKDAP that does not depend on any single bank's app. The partnership carries two stated commitments: fast transaction settlement on the chain, and access to tokenized products built on Solana, the segment of on-chain finance often grouped under DeFi 2.0. No launch date, supply figure or transaction count for HKDAP on the network has been disclosed. The contrast between the two issuers is now explicit. HSBC is acquiring stablecoin users through payment and banking apps it already owns, converting part of its 3.3 million-strong PayMe base step by step. Anchorpoint is weighting its approach toward public blockchain distribution and links to tokenized financial products. HSBC's wager is that licensed distribution through trusted bank rails wins the mass market; Anchorpoint's is that open settlement and on-chain finance pull the next wave of users. Both issuers operate under the same HKMA framework that Elhedery praised, so the competition is over rails and reach, not over permission. Which model carries more of Hong Kong's dollar-stablecoin activity will turn on how the bank-run payment infrastructure and the public-chain route develop side by side.

Two Rails, One HKD License

The week-one figure matters as the first measured user base for a licensed Hong Kong dollar stablecoin, and it comes from a closed bank app rather than an exchange or a public chain. HSBC's 50,000 users are bounded by PayMe's 3.3 million install base, so the ceiling on this model is the bank's own retail reach. Anchorpoint's Solana route points the same license toward open issuance and redemption, but with no launch date, supply number or transaction count disclosed for HKDAP on the network, how far that use runs beyond the announcement is unreported. What the first week confirms is the described use, paying, topping up wallets and planning tokenized products; scale past HSBC's app is still to be measured.