More banks now issue their own digital money. Whether one bank’s token will be accepted at another is still unanswered.
On October 23 HSBC launched RedCoin, a Hong Kong dollar stablecoin, through its PayMe app. Wallet activation is rolling out to more than 3.3 million users, and payments work at more than 100,000 merchants. The same day the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand had joined BLOOM, its initiative on cross-border settlement in tokenised deposits and regulated stablecoins. Nine days earlier, Qivalis, a euro stablecoin issuer backed by 37 banks in 15 countries, was authorised by De Nederlandsche Bank.
Three Ways to Issue
HSBC is issuing alone. RedCoin is backed by segregated reserve assets and redeemable at par, but it pays no interest and is not covered by Hong Kong’s Deposit Protection Scheme. That leaves the holder with no return and no deposit protection. What RedCoin offers is a way to pay. It runs on HSBC’s own distributed ledger network, and HSBC plans to add a mobile banking wallet, tokenised fund subscriptions and corporate clients. HSBC and Anchorpoint, set up by Standard Chartered Hong Kong, Animoca Brands and HKT, received Hong Kong’s first stablecoin issuer licences in April. Anchorpoint began serving institutional clients in August.
Others are issuing together. Qivalis expects to launch within months, subject to MiCA rules and a published whitepaper. In Japan, MUFG, Mizuho and SMBC ran a joint pilot of one yen stablecoin from July 17 to 23, a single deposit-backed token issued under the Payment Services Act with Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking as agent trustee. It is designed to circulate only among users who have passed identity checks at banks. The banks are aiming for live transactions in the fiscal year ending March 2027.
The third route is led by regulators. MAS launched BLOOM in October 2025. Its participants now include Circle, Coinbase, DBS, Ant International, Visa, Mastercard, Ripple, Maybank, Nium and the World Bank Group, alongside the three central banks.
The Gap Between Them
Each of these works inside its own boundary. MAS says that as institutions develop different kinds of digital money, greater coordination will be needed to use them across borders. BLOOM is working on common approaches to accepting, exchanging and settling these tokens, covering contracts, identity checks and sanctions controls. MAS says that could cut the separate arrangements institutions now need for each counterparty or market. It has not named a token, corridor or start date. Among the pilots, Ripple plans to test stablecoin payments released when a shipment is verified, and Visa is looking at stablecoin settlement over weekends and holidays.
Europe expects several forms to coexist. The ECB’s 2026 payments strategy keeps tokenised central bank money as the base of wholesale settlement, with tokenised bank deposits and regulated euro stablecoins alongside it. The ECB says a digital euro could be issued in 2029 if lawmakers pass the legislation this year.
For banks the practical questions are acceptance, protection and settlement. Will a counterparty take another bank’s token? What does the holder get if the issuer fails? Does settlement between issuers run in central bank money or a private asset? Right now each project answers those for itself. Until shared rules like BLOOM’s are in place, a bank token is useful mainly inside the network of whoever issued it.
