HSBC has launched RedCoin, a Hong Kong dollar stablecoin, inside PayMe, its payments app with more than 3.3 million users, CoinDesk and The Block report.
Users can activate a stablecoin wallet over the coming days, then send money to friends and family and pay at more than 100,000 merchants.
HSBC says RedCoin is fully backed by high-quality liquid assets held in separate accounts. That is the bank’s description, and the reports cite no independent attestation.
The licence behind it dates from April, when the Hong Kong Monetary Authority granted its first stablecoin issuer licences to HSBC and Anchorpoint Financial, a venture led by Standard Chartered. Anchorpoint began a limited rollout of its own token in August, aimed at institutional payments and settlement.
More is promised but not yet live. A RedCoin wallet in HSBC’s main Hong Kong banking app is due later this year, and customers could then use it to buy tokenised investments, including a new share class of the bank’s Hong Kong dollar money market fund. John O’Neill, HSBC’s managing director for digital assets and currencies, said wholesale corporate and institutional uses will follow.
Vincent Chok, chief executive of First Digital, which issues the FDUSD stablecoin, argued that putting stablecoins inside platforms people already use removes the need for a separate wallet or exchange account.
What nobody has published is take-up. Access to an app is not the same as a balance in it, and HSBC has given no figure for activations, issuance or the reserves behind the coin.
