Phoenix Satellite TV Exclusive Interview with New Fire Group CEO Livio: Planning to Establish Hong Kong Stablecoin Trading and Asset Management Business

ME News message. On April 14 (UTC+8), Livio Weng, CEO of Xinhuo Group, recently accepted an exclusive interview with Phoenix Television, sharing his interpretation of Hong Kong’s stablecoin licensing and industry development. He said that this regulatory move is prudent and reasonable, as it can avoid a “sprinkle-the-pepper” effect caused by resource dispersion and significantly improve the certainty of the development of compliant projects. Meanwhile, the Hong Kong dollar stablecoin track urgently needs to seize opportunities to achieve a turnaround and leap forward.

Livio Weng said that issuing two stablecoin licenses from among 36 applicants in Hong Kong is controversial, but it is not a bad thing. Prudent regulatory decisions have more advantages than disadvantages. The success of stablecoins depends on large-scale applications and coordinated synergy across the ecosystem. Too many licenses can lead to resource dispersion and inefficient “sprinkle-the-pepper” style competition, which in turn constrains the overall development of the industry. At present, more than 80% of the global stablecoin supply is concentrated in USDT and USDC, the two major leading players. Hong Kong’s “2 vs 2” pattern has strategic reference value.

He revealed that, taking Xinhuo Group as an example, as a leading digital asset services company in Hong Kong, the group has seen significant customer growth over the past six months, and a considerable portion of its customers have raised stablecoin-related needs. Therefore, we also plan to build stablecoin trading and asset management businesses in the coming six months. For supporting which of these two licenses, Xinhuo’s choice is very clear: either choose one in the two-option selection, or support both simultaneously. Other companies similar to Xinhuo will face the same situation.

When discussing industry catch-up and overtaking, Livio Weng pointed out that the global top stablecoins already have an outstanding supply exceeding $300 billion, and their development cycle lasts more than ten years. Hong Kong’s regulatory rollout pace is ahead of the world, but compared with the existing “wild stablecoins,” it is still in a catching-up position. The focus needs to be on building differentiated advantages around core scenarios in order to achieve a turnaround and leap forward.

Regarding new opportunities for stablecoins in the AI Agent era, he believes that AI Agents, as a historical product, will fundamentally reshape productivity, and stablecoins are the most natural financial primitives for that. The development of AI Agents will go through three major stages. In the initial stage, as human assistants, due to their high-frequency, small-amount, 7×24-hour nonstop interaction characteristics, traditional banks and the SWIFT system are difficult to support; stablecoins will become the payment tool most suited to this, ushering in explosive application and driving massive global adoption. In the stage of equal cooperation with humans, AI Agents may be even more inclined toward decentralized native tokens such as Bitcoin. In the distant future, AI might even autonomously issue currencies. Overall, AI Agents will, for a long period of time, remain a key force driving large-scale adoption of stablecoin applications. (Source: Xinhuo Group)