No stablecoin licenses issued this month. Financial Supervisory Commission: Fully pushing forward.

The Monetary Authority earlier said it would seek to issue the first batch of stablecoin issuer licenses within March; however, as of March 31, no official licensing announcement has yet been seen, and the market is watching whether the timeline for granting licenses may be delayed.

In response to this newspaper’s enquiry, the Monetary Authority said it is pushing ahead with the licensing process with full effort and will announce it to the public in a timely manner.

The Monetary Authority announced last October that it had received stablecoin license applications submitted by 36 institutions. The Chief Executive, Eddie Yue, said in February this year that it would strive to issue the first batch of stablecoin licenses in March, but the number of licenses granted would definitely not be large; the goal would be a cautious and prudent approach. He also said at the time that the authorities had asked some applicants to provide additional information. Since the first round of submissions mainly consisted of the basic information required for licensing, after conducting review and research, further follow-up questions would still need to be raised on certain key elements, such as details of the specific application scenarios, risk management measures, anti-money laundering arrangements, and the composition of reserve assets.

In February this year, Chief Executive John Lee said at the opening ceremony of the Consensus Hong Kong conference that the Monetary Authority is actively handling licensing applications and believes that the licenses for the first batch of stablecoin issuers will be issued in March. In the Budget released by the Financial Secretary, Paul Chan, at the end of February, it also still stated that Hong Kong has already implemented a fiat-backed stablecoin issuer licensing regime and would issue the first batch of licenses in March.