Hong Kong’s Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury, Christopher Hui, has revealed that the Special Administrative Region is planning to submit a draft digital assets framework in 2026.
Speaking to the Legislative Council’s panel on Financial Services Policy, on January 30, Hui said the Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau (FSTB) and Securities and Futures Commission (SFC)—the former responsible for government policy on finance and Treasury, the latter for regulating the securities and futures market—were planning to introduce a bill “within this year” on the regulatory regime for virtual assets, virtual asset management service providers, virtual asset trading and custodian service providers.
“The FSTB and the SFC jointly issued consultation conclusions on the legislative proposal to establish a regulatory regime for virtual asset trading and custodian service providers in December last year, and are working out the details of the relevant regulatory regime,” said the Secretary.
The comments came as part of a broader summary of how Hong Kong plans to consolidate its status as an international financial center, with goals ranging from strengthening the territory’s stock market and status as an international asset, wealth, and risk management center, to “encouraging childbirth.”
Among these, Hui outlined Hong Kong’s plan for the “steady development of fintech,” a part of which involved the new virtual asset regulatory regime.
Another part of this will be the introduction of legislative proposals to implement the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), a global tax transparency initiative introduced in June 2023 to set a standard for tax reporting and improve the exchange of information between countries on digital asset transactions, to combat tax evasion and avoidance.
According to Hui, Hong Kong is eyeing “automatically exchanging tax information related to crypto-asset transactions with other jurisdictions from 2028 onwards, in line with international efforts to combat cross-border tax evasion.”
He added that the Legislative Council was “soliciting public views on the legislative proposals.”
As well as future plans and goals, the Secretary highlighted Hong Kong’s “Stablecoin Ordinance,” which was officially implemented in August 2025 and introduced a licensing regime for fiat stablecoin issuers in Hong Kong, along with guidelines on issuance, redemption, and custody.
Earlier in January, Hong Kong Financial Secretary Paul Chan, speaking at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, revealed that the special administrative region was preparing to issue its first batch of licenses to stablecoin providers in the first quarter of this year.
Hui appeared to confirm this in his comments last Friday, telling the Legislative Council’s Finance Committee that the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) “is currently processing the relevant license applications.”
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Source: https://coingeek.com/hong-kong-to-table-digital-asset-bill-within-this-year/
