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Standard Chartered Bank Hong Kong (SCBHK) announced on Aug. 24 that it has become the first authorized bank distributor of HKDAP, the Hong Kong dollar-backed stablecoin issued by Anchorpoint Financial.
Standard Chartered Becomes First Bank to Distribute Hong Kong-Regulated HKDAP Stablecoin
Standard Chartered has become the first bank to distribute one of Hong Kong’s two regulated stablecoins, offering HKDAP, issued by Anchorpoint Financial, to eligible institutional clients… pic.twitter.com/omofoXxo0L
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) August 24, 2026
The press release describes the milestone as SCBHK winning a competitive distribution role. The underlying relationship is closer than that description suggests.
Anchorpoint is a joint venture Standard Chartered formed with HKT and Animoca Brands in February 2025, and SCBHK is Anchorpoint’s largest shareholder.
Standard Chartered CEO for Hong Kong and Greater China Mary Huen called the move a milestone that reflects the bank’s belief in the transformative potential of tokenized money to support the real-world economy.
A bank distributing its own affiliate’s product to institutional clients is a materially different arrangement than a bank competing for and winning third-party distribution rights. The announcement’s language leans toward the latter framing without directly stating the ownership structure.
The initial use cases disclosed are concrete: SCBHK plans to launch tokenized money market fund subscriptions and settlements with international and local asset managers in the fourth quarter, alongside intragroup treasury and liquidity settlement across its network.
Anchorpoint co-founder Dominic Maffei said Standard Chartered’s participation as an authorized distributor marks an important milestone in the growth of the HKDAP ecosystem.
The scale of Hong Kong’s licensing regime sharpens what this distribution deal actually represents.
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority received 36 formal stablecoin issuer applications by its September 2025 deadline. It approved exactly two, Anchorpoint and HSBC, a 5.6% approval rate that notably excluded OSL, a licensed virtual asset platform the market had widely expected to make the cut.
With only two licensed HKD stablecoin issuers in existence, Standard Chartered isn’t competing against rival banks for HKDAP distribution so much as building a vertically integrated stack where it controls both issuance and distribution under one ownership structure.
HSBC, the only other licensee, is pursuing a visibly different model. Rather than seeking external bank distributors, HSBC plans to integrate its stablecoin directly into PayMe, which serves more than 3.3 million users, and its mobile banking app.
In other words, both of Hong Kong’s licensed stablecoin issuers are building closed loops through their existing customer bases rather than opening distribution to genuinely independent banking partners.
An independent review published by BlockSec on August 14, ten days before SCBHK’s announcement, examined HKDAP’s deployed contract on Ethereum mainnet and found that its KYC revocation mechanism does not function as written and that its governance is so concentrated that a single key can mint, burn, or freeze funds.
BlockSec mapped these findings against specific clauses of the HKMA’s Guideline on Supervision of Licensed Stablecoin Issuers and found the deployed contract diverges from the clause requiring high-risk operations not to be executable by a single party, among others.
SCB’s press release, which positions HKDAP for institutional fund settlement and treasury use cases beginning in the fourth quarter, does not mention BlockSec’s review. Ten days passed between the review’s publication and this announcement, with no public response from either company in that window.
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