On January 21, 2026, at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting held in Davos, Switzerland, Hong Kong's Financial Secretary Paul Chan sent a clear regulatory signal regarding digital assets to global political and business elites. On one hand, he reiterated that Hong Kong would advance rule-making according to the principle of "same activities, same risks, same regulation," explicitly mentioning that licenses for on-chain payment tools would be issued in the future. On the other hand, he showcased Hong Kong's substantial investment in infrastructure and market systems by citing the issuance of licenses to 11 trading platforms and the issuance of approximately $2.1 billion in three batches of tokenized green bonds. Amid a global tightening of regulations, Hong Kong is attempting to walk a tightrope between the new capital chase and systemic risks with a "proactive and prudent" stance. The next question to pursue is how this series of regulatory choices will reshape the digital asset landscape in Asia and reorder the flow of funds and the ranking of regional financial centers.
From Avoidance to Proactive Engagement: A Shift in Hong Kong's Regulatory Attitude
If we draw a timeline of global regulatory evolution over the past decade, we can see a shift from early observation and even tacit approval of gray market transactions involving on-chain assets to a tightening of rules and increased licensing thresholds in major financial jurisdictions in Europe, America, and Asia following several market crashes and project failures. Before this round of tightening, Hong Kong was long viewed as relatively conservative: imposing layers of restrictions on retail participation and adopting "remote management" for unregulated platforms, playing more of a risk isolator than a system shaper. Chan's speech in Davos marks a turning point in this attitude, as regulators are no longer trying to simply avoid such assets but are preparing to incorporate them into the existing financial regulatory framework.
In Chan's statements, "same activities, same risks, same regulation" is a high-frequency keyword. This expression resonates with the "technology neutrality" approach emphasized by Europe and America when discussing digital assets, which means that regulatory requirements should not be lowered simply because assets are on-chain, nor should they be broadly labeled as "speculative" or "illegal" and banned outright. However, compared to some European and American jurisdictions that have already issued written rules and even differentiated regulatory intensity by asset type, Hong Kong emphasizes "marrying" new assets within the existing frameworks of securities, payments, and asset management, aiming to minimize the arbitrage opportunities created by fragmented regulation. The so-called "proactive and prudent" approach is reflected in specific policies that maintain an open attitude towards innovation, but with the premise of incorporating licensing management and meeting a comprehensive set of requirements regarding capital strength, risk control capabilities, and compliance construction. In other words, Hong Kong is willing to allow market experimentation, but such experimentation must occur within robust safeguards.
This shift in attitude is not driven by a single event but is the result of multiple overlapping forces. On one hand, competition among global financial centers is expanding from traditional equity and debt businesses to on-chain assets and financial technology infrastructure. Those who can provide a clear and predictable regulatory path earlier will have the opportunity to attract a new round of institutional capital and technology teams. On the other hand, Hong Kong needs to find new growth engines that balance serving the mainland's real economy and participating in global capital flows, and the combination of financial technology, green finance, and on-chain assets aligns perfectly with this need. Coupled with other regional centers actively positioning themselves, Hong Kong no longer has the luxury of delay, and choosing to clarify its stance on an international stage like Davos sends a signal to the outside world that it has "turned to proactive engagement."
11 Licenses and $2.1 Billion: From Gray Margins to the Regulatory Main Battlefield
Issuing licenses to 11 trading platforms is presented by Chan as a phased achievement of Hong Kong's regulatory path. This is not only a milestone in terms of quantity but also represents a restructuring of the market landscape—long-standing on-chain asset trading in Hong Kong has existed in a gray area between allowance and prohibition, with participants lacking certainty regarding legal attributes and regulatory boundaries. The emergence of licenses signifies that this market is beginning to transition from the margins to a visible main battlefield within the mainstream financial system, where platforms must take clearer responsibility for customer asset security, anti-money laundering compliance, and market manipulation prevention, while also gaining the identity to publicly operate towards institutions and qualified investors.
Alongside the licensed platforms, three batches of tokenized green bonds totaling approximately $2.1 billion are being advanced. Officially led issuance means that Hong Kong has chosen to provide a "model project" for the market starting from the public sector's balance sheet: on one hand, testing the technical and legal feasibility of the entire process of on-chain issuance, settlement, and holding; on the other hand, through the highly politically correct financial product of green bonds, bundling ESG narratives with digital infrastructure to reduce external resistance to this "new species." The logic of moving from public to private is that the government first verifies the reliability of the mechanism, and then encourages commercial banks, corporate bond issuers, and asset managers to migrate more traditional securities onto the chain, making tokenization no longer just a concept but a replicable industrial process.
The regulatory sandbox plays a key role in this process. By providing projects with the space to test new models within a controlled environment, Hong Kong's regulators attempt to use a "safety net" to encourage more traditional institutions and fintech companies to experiment with on-chain assets. In the sandbox, regulators can identify risk elements in business models earlier, technology companies receive feedback in a real environment, and financial institutions accumulate experience under limited liability. This mechanism sends multiple signals to international institutions and regional platforms: players with compliance genes willing to invest in building risk control systems will find Hong Kong a worthwhile long-term testing ground; while platforms relying on high leverage, high returns, and information opacity to acquire customers will be marginalized or even eliminated under the dual pressure of high thresholds and high ongoing compliance costs.
The Game of Payment Landscape: Preparing New Licenses Amid Global Tightening
In his statements at Davos, Chan mentioned that Hong Kong expects to issue relevant licenses for on-chain payment tools later in 2026, while emphasizing that there is currently no clear timetable, nor are there publicly available technical routes and specific operational details. This "first throwing out direction, then supplementing details" rhythm provides the market with expectations and preparation time for institutions, while also reserving space for Hong Kong to adjust its framework according to the latest global regulatory trends.
Looking at the larger global context, as Europe and America impose increasingly stringent capital requirements, reserve compositions, issuance, and circulation constraints on related payment tools, Hong Kong's choice to embrace this more actively at this time is particularly striking. For Hong Kong, these tools are not only related to the emerging asset class itself but are also deeply tied to payment settlement efficiency, cross-border capital flow costs, and the international image of its currency. If, under a compliant framework, on-chain payment tools can be formed that are pegged to the Hong Kong dollar and primarily issued and settled in Hong Kong, there will be an opportunity to replicate Hong Kong's offshore market experience onto the chain, providing new options for cross-border e-commerce, trade financing, and personal cross-border payments.
From a strategic perspective, this type of license is not just a regulatory permit for a single product but also a declaration of Hong Kong's willingness to undertake the capability of settling global compliant funds on-chain. It potentially carries three expectations: enhancing regional payment and settlement efficiency, creating new usage scenarios for Hong Kong dollar-related assets, and maintaining Hong Kong's hub role in a multi-currency system amid increasing global financial fragmentation and geopolitical division. However, alongside the opportunities, there are concerns about regulatory arbitrage; if Hong Kong's requirements are significantly lower than those of mainstream financial centers in Europe and America, it may attract short-sighted capital influx while increasing the impact on the banking system and money market. Moreover, if related tools are widely used as vehicles for cross-border value storage and transfer, there is a need to guard against Hong Kong being passively drawn into a "shadow dollar zone," which poses significant challenges to the current monetary and macro-prudential frameworks.
Financial and Technological Acceleration: The Dual Narrative Hong Kong Tells Internally and Externally
In his speech at Davos, Chan deliberately used phrases like "finance and technology promote each other" and "enhancing transparency, efficiency, and risk management" to build a narrative framework for Hong Kong's route choice. Externally, he needs to explain to Wall Street and a broader range of international institutions that Hong Kong is not merely chasing trends but hopes to embed on-chain technology into existing financial infrastructure to solve old problems: high post-trade processing costs, severe information asymmetry, and the difficulty of verifying the authenticity of green investments. Internally, he is sending a signal to mainland regulators and the industry that Hong Kong's digital asset attempts are paving the way for the overall financial technology layout of the country while ensuring baseline safety, and can provide experiential samples for broader institutional design in the future.
Tokenized green bonds are a concentrated model of this narrative. By recording the flow of raised funds and project execution on-chain, Hong Kong hopes to introduce finer granularity of data transparency into green finance, ensuring that "green" is no longer just a label in issuance materials but can continuously be monitored through technological means. Implicit in this is a vision for future on-chain financial infrastructure: whether bonds, funds, or structured products, they could be issued, circulated, and custodied under unified or compatible technical standards, thereby reducing the opacity and systemic risks brought about by multi-layer nesting.
The regulatory sandbox is the field that pulls this vision from paper into reality. In the sandbox, regulators, technology companies, and traditional financial institutions do not simply have a relationship of approval and being approved; rather, they continuously redefine responsibility boundaries through iteration. On one hand, regulators understand the real incentives behind technical details and business models through intensive interaction with project parties, allowing them to design rules that can provide a safety net without overly stifling innovation; on the other hand, technology companies learn to articulate their solutions in a language that the financial industry can understand, while traditional institutions adjust their organizational structures and risk control systems through limited-scale pilot projects. This kind of collaboration is not easy, but it is practically significant for alleviating overseas concerns about Hong Kong's risk tolerance while leaving enough innovative space for local participants.
A Moment of Global Tension: Contrarian Bets Amid Risk Aversion
Looking beyond the Davos venue to the global macro environment, we find that Hong Kong's high-profile discussion of digital assets occurs at a highly tense moment. The Greenland incident has triggered geopolitical security concerns, driving up precious metal prices and leading to a renewed interest in traditional safe-haven assets; meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court's hearing of the "Trump v. Cook" case has drawn significant market attention regarding whether it will shake expectations of the Federal Reserve's independence, potentially having profound impacts on the pricing of dollar assets and the global interest rate path. In this context, global investors prefer safe assets such as cash, short-duration bonds, and gold, with overall risk appetite contracting.
Just as risk aversion is rising and traditional assets are being embraced again, Hong Kong chooses to place the development of digital assets, the licensing system, and future plans on the global stage of the World Economic Forum. This contrast itself is a strategic expression. For funds seeking safety, on-chain assets are clearly not a primary consideration; however, for those institutions still needing to find new growth curves amid high interest rates and tightening regulations, a clear regulatory path and predictable compliance costs become one of the most critical variables when evaluating new markets. Global capital does not exist in a binary choice between "risk aversion" and "seeking new opportunities," but rather shows a structural differentiation where some retreat to safe assets while others seek controllable trial-and-error spaces in regions where new rules are gradually clarifying.
In the competition among Asian digital asset centers, Hong Kong's strong voice at this moment is clearly intended to create a narrative distinction from regional competitors. Singapore, after experiencing several project failures, has become more cautious regarding related businesses, emphasizing investor protection and systemic risk prevention; Japan is steadily advancing clear classifications and tax rules for specific types of on-chain assets, taking a more incremental approach. In contrast, Hong Kong is forming a combination of strengths in the number of licensed platforms, the scale of tokenized bonds, and the upcoming payment tool licenses, conveying an impression of "regulatory framework taking shape, enforcement strength considerable, and experimental scope expanding in an orderly manner" to the market. This may attract some funds and project teams that have concerns about the regulatory environments in Southeast Asia, Japan, and South Korea, viewing Hong Kong as a candidate for the next stage of regional hubs.
Dancing in the Gaps: The Opportunities and Costs of Hong Kong's Digital Asset Bets
Based on the information Paul Chan presented in Davos, Hong Kong's path is gradually becoming clear: using licensed trading platforms as the front for liquidity and price discovery, building a demonstrative on-chain issuance and settlement channel with approximately $2.1 billion in tokenized green bonds, and utilizing the regulatory sandbox as a pilot base for systems and technology, with plans to introduce licenses for on-chain payment tools. This entire policy combination aims to detach digital assets from speculative labels and embed them within Hong Kong's existing competitive advantages as an international financial center.
However, a clear path does not mean that risks have been mitigated. The regulatory details for on-chain payment tools have yet to be established, and the policy direction of major global jurisdictions may quickly reverse with political cycles and financial events. What is currently visible is merely a phase of configuration, not a "regulatory endgame." In promoting innovation, Hong Kong needs to continuously balance attracting capital with preventing itself from being exploited as a regulatory loophole; should a significant risk event occur, external public opinion and internal prudential impulses could force a sudden policy halt.
In such an uncertain environment, it is more important for market participants to figure out how to leverage this regulatory window rather than simply betting on a single policy outcome. For institutional investors, Hong Kong can be viewed as a key node for laying out compliant on-chain assets in Asia. Within the limits of risk budgets, they can build research and execution capabilities in advance by participating in licensed platforms, tokenized bonds, and sandbox projects; however, they also need to manage policy expectations carefully to avoid over-reliance on yet-to-be-formed payment tool licenses for constructing long-term business models. For project parties, Hong Kong offers a "high threshold, high compliance, high visibility" growth path. Teams willing to deeply integrate with traditional finance and possessing clear governance structures and transparent information disclosure may obtain higher quality capital and partners here; meanwhile, models that rely on regulatory vacuums and arbitrage opportunities are unlikely to survive long-term within this framework. Hong Kong is dancing in the gaps, and the real question is who can stand on the side with the lights still on before this dance ends.
Join our community to discuss and grow stronger together!
Official Telegram community: https://t.me/aicoincn
AiCoin Chinese Twitter: https://x.com/AiCoinzh
OKX Benefits Group: https://aicoin.com/link/chat?cid=l61eM4owQ
Binance Benefits Group: https://aicoin.com/link/chat?cid=ynr7d1P6Z
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
