HSBC’s RedCoin stablecoin signs up 50,000 users in first week
HSBC says its Hong Kong dollar stablecoin RedCoin signed up 50,000 users in just over a week after its October 23 launch inside PayMe.
HSBC said its Hong Kong dollar stablecoin RedCoin reached 50,000 users in its first week, a figure CEO Georges Elhedery gave at Hong Kong FinTech Week on November 2.
RedCoin went live inside HSBC’s PayMe mobile wallet on October 23, letting users hold and pay with the token at more than 100,000 merchants, the bank says. HSBC has not disclosed transaction volume for the first ten days, so the adoption count is the only usage figure released so far.
The token, denominated in RCHKD, runs on a permissioned Hyperledger Besu ledger. It is the retail face of a regime the Hong Kong Monetary Authority set in motion when it granted HSBC a stablecoin issuer license under FRS02 on April 10, one of only two licenses awarded from 36 applications. The bank had mapped the ground before launch: a survey HSBC cited when naming the token on September 30 found 74% of Hong Kong consumers recognized a stablecoin use case.
The first-week number matters for a reason beyond HSBC’s own results. Banks elsewhere are only now moving tokens into everyday wallets: Revolut is rolling out its euro stablecoin EURR across Europe, and Mastercard built a Global Money Platform with BVNK to bring stablecoins into banking and cards. Against those projects, RedCoin is the closest thing the HKMA regime has to a live test of whether regulated, bank-run tokens can win retail users.
Independent attestation of RedCoin’s reserves is not expected until after the fourth quarter.
