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HSBC Says RedCoin Stablecoin Hit 50,000 Users in Its First Week
The Hong Kong dollar token reached about 1.5% of PayMe's 3.3 million users, and HSBC plans to put it in its main banking app next.
HSBC's RedCoin stablecoin signed up 50,000 users in just over a week, Group CEO Georges Elhedery said Monday at Hong Kong FinTech Week, the South China Morning Post reported.
The Hong Kong dollar token went live Oct. 23 inside PayMe, the bank's payments app, which has more than 3.3 million users. That puts the early count at about 1.5% of the app's reach. TokenPost reported the same figure and noted that the 3.3 million is potential reach, not RedCoin users.
"Of course, our target is multimillion users," Elhedery said, according to the SCMP. He credited the "comfortable" rules set by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority for the quick start.
How RedCoin works
Each RedCoin is meant to be redeemable for one Hong Kong dollar and runs on HSBC's private, permissioned blockchain, TokenPost reported. A PayMe user turns on a wallet inside the app with no minimum balance, then can send coins to friends or pay at more than 100,000 merchants. Nobody needs a separate crypto wallet.
What comes next
HSBC plans to offer RedCoin in its HSBC HK Mobile Banking app and to let customers use it to buy tokenized funds, including a money market fund, both outlets reported. Elhedery said it would later reach all HSBC and Hang Seng Bank clients but gave no timetable.
HSBC is one of two licensed stablecoin issuers in the city. The other, Anchorpoint, a venture of Standard Chartered, Animoca Brands and HKT, opened beta access to its HKDAP coin in August and is aiming for retail use "as early as end-2026," the SCMP reported.
The bank did not say how many of the 50,000 have actually paid with the coin.
In our opinion: Fifty thousand sign-ups is a solid week for a coin that arrived inside an app people already had, though a wallet opened out of curiosity is the digital cousin of a January gym card. The figure that counts is spending, so watch for HSBC to report payment volume and to put a date on the banking-app rollout. If both of Hong Kong's licensed issuers reach retail by year end, the city becomes a live test of bank-issued coins against dollar tokens.
Sources: South China Morning Post · TokenPost
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