The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) said on Monday 2 November that EnsembleTX, the pilot phase of Project Ensemble, can now settle blockchain. The holder keeps a claim on the bank, so banking rules, deposit insurance (when the account qualifies) and interest can apply, unlike a stablecoin, which is a claim on its issuer.">tokenized deposit transactions between banks in tokenized central bank money around the clock. The announcement, made during Hong Kong FinTech Week, puts the pilot at 12 banks and 20 other firms. It gives no start hour, no transaction count and no end date.
Hong Kong 24/7 tokenized settlement is therefore a new capability inside a real-money pilot, and not yet a market service open to all. Regulated stablecoins are not part of it. A second HKMA release says only that “the trials” will take them in “soon”, with no date and no coin named.
The comparison readers will reach for is Europe’s Pontes, and the two are different things. Pontes is a production launch, live since 21 September, and the ECB plans to extend its hours until it reaches 24/7/365 availability in 2028. EnsembleTX is a pilot that already claims round-the-clock settlement.
Hong Kong 24/7 tokenized settlement: what the HKMA announced on 2 November
Two HKMA documents dated 2 November matter here, and they do not say the same amount. The dedicated release says EnsembleTX has “entered a new chapter” supporting interbank settlement of tokenized deposit transactions in tokenized central bank money on a 24/7 basis. It adds that banks and other firms can now settle “beyond conventional operating hours”.
The second document, the FinTech Week release, is shorter on this point. It says EnsembleTX has reached “24/7 real-value transactions”, and it names no participating bank and no stablecoin. It is also where two further items appear: completed trial trades in which Recognised Dealers traded tokenized Exchange Fund Bills in the secondary market, and the plan to bring in regulated stablecoins. Exchange Fund Bills are short-term debt issued by the HKMA, and it says the trades should make secondary and repo trading more efficient.
The release gives no size, number or date for those trades, and no list of the dealers involved.
HKMA chief executive Eddie Yue presented the step as more than a technical upgrade. “In just two years, Project Ensemble has transitioned from experimentation and piloting to a new phase,” he said in the release, one “focused on promoting the commercialisation of tokenisation applications”. The same release still calls EnsembleTX the pilot phase, and uses “controlled pilot environment” for how it has run since November 2025, so pilot is the label we use.
Julia Leung, chief executive officer of the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC), named the uses she expects. “Tokenised deposits can now power around-the-clock transactions,” she said, pointing to corporate treasury management and secondary trading of tokenized funds on licensed platforms.
Who is in the pilot: 12 banks and 20 other firms
The FinTech Week release names no participating bank, but the annex to the dedicated release does. Seven banks joined in 2025: Bank of China (Hong Kong), China Construction Bank (Asia), Fubon Bank (Hong Kong), Fusion Bank, Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong), The Bank of East Asia and The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.
Five joined in 2026: Bank of Communications (Hong Kong), China CITIC Bank International, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (Asia), Industrial Bank’s Hong Kong branch and Nanyang Commercial Bank.
The annex calls them tokenized deposit banks: commercial banks that offer tokenized deposits to customers in Hong Kong and settle interbank tokenized deposit transactions through EnsembleTX in a real-value setting. That describes the pilot as a whole. The HKMA does not say whether all 12 have used the 24/7 settlement, or whether any has settled a live transaction outside normal hours.
The 20 other firms split into 13 from 2025 and seven from 2026. The first group includes BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Ant International and Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing. The newcomers include Hashkey Group, EX.IO, JINGDONG Technology and CMU OmniClear.
Why tokenized central bank money changes the pilot
A tokenized deposit is a claim on a commercial bank, recorded on a ledger. When a customer of one bank pays a customer of another, the two banks still have to settle between themselves, and that final step happens in central bank money. If that last leg closes at the end of the working day, the token can move at any hour, but the banks cannot finish the job.
That was the limit of the first version. When the HKMA started EnsembleTX on 13 November 2025, interbank settlement went through the Hong Kong dollar Real Time Gross Settlement system (RTGS), and the plan was to upgrade step by step to tokenized central bank money on a 24/7 basis. The pilot followed the Ensemble Sandbox, running since August 2024 with experimental tokenized deposits. Under RTGS, the HKMA says, firms used tokenized deposits for corporate treasury management and tokenized money market fund transactions. The 2025 release said EnsembleTX would operate throughout 2026.
Monday’s text confirms the upgrade and offers no new end date. Nor does it say what happens to RTGS in the pilot, or describe the token itself: who can hold it, on what ledger it runs, and whether any limit applies. Yue, according to Cointelegraph, called tokenized central bank money a “foundation layer” for 24/7 settlement.
How Hong Kong compares with the ECB’s Pontes and Appia
The Eurosystem took a different order. Pontes launched on 21 September 2026 as a live link for wholesale tokenized assets, open at first to any entity with access to T2, the euro area’s central bank settlement system. Eligible ledger operators include central securities depositories and operators under the EU’s DLT Pilot Regime.
Hours come later. In a speech in Frankfurt on 29 October, ECB executive board member Piero Cipollone said hours will be extended “significantly by mid-2027”, with “24/7/365 availability” in 2028. He also said the ECB plans to offer immediate settlement finality on the Eurosystem DLT platform as early as next year. The ECB pages we read do not state the current hours.
Appia sits further out. It is the Eurosystem’s work on a wider tokenized market around common standards, with a blueprint due by 2028, and its consultation drew 127 replies without settling how many networks Europe needs.
| Hong Kong: EnsembleTX | Eurosystem: Pontes | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Pilot phase, real-value transactions | Production launch for wholesale settlement |
| Started | Announced 13 November 2025 | 21 September 2026 |
| Settlement asset | Tokenized central bank money (HKD RTGS at launch) | Central bank money |
| 24/7 | Announced 2 November 2026, no start hour given | Planned for 2028 |
| Next step | Stablecoin trials “soon”, no date | Longer hours by mid-2027 |
| Participants | 12 banks and 20 other firms named | Any entity with T2 access |
Read the table as two different projects, not a race. EnsembleTX covers the firms the HKMA lists in its annex, while Pontes is open to any entity with T2 access. Neither side has published volumes in the documents we read, so these sources cannot show which one settles more.
Stablecoin trials have no date and no named coin
This is the thinnest part of the news. The FinTech Week release says the HKMA “will soon expand the trials to include regulated stablecoins”. There is no date, no issuer, no coin and no use case. The dedicated Ensemble release does not mention stablecoins at all.
Which trials is also unclear. The sentence comes straight after the Exchange Fund Bill trades, and Cointelegraph reads it as an extension of those trades. The HKMA does not spell that out, and neither release says stablecoins will use the 24/7 settlement.
Licences exist. Hong Kong’s stablecoin regime has applied since August 2025, and the first two issuer licences went to Anchorpoint Financial and HSBC on 10 April 2026. The HKMA has not said that either issuer’s coin will take part. HSBC’s place in the pilot is as a tokenized deposit bank, a separate role.
The one usage figure comes from a single outlet. Cointelegraph quotes HSBC group chief executive Georges Elhedery at FinTech Week saying “We have 50,000 users” of RedCoin, the bank’s Hong Kong dollar stablecoin, about 10 days after its debut, and targeting “multi-million users”. We found no second source for the number. The outlet treats RedCoin as a retail payments rollout, apart from the settlement work in Ensemble.
What it changes for readers outside Hong Kong
Directly, very little. EnsembleTX is built for participating banks and firms, and the HKMA announced nothing for retail crypto holders.
The indirect interest is in the design. In Hong Kong’s pilot, banks settle tokenized deposits in central bank money first, and regulated stablecoins enter trials later. For fund managers already listed, such as BlackRock and Franklin Templeton, weekend settlement could let a tokenized money fund trade finish without waiting for Monday. That is our reading of the capability: neither firm comments in the releases, and the HKMA reports no such trade.
A European central bank was on stage. Denis Beau, first deputy governor of the Banque de France, joined Tommaso Mancini-Griffoli of the BIS Innovation Hub and Elhedery on a panel moderated by Yue at Hong Kong FinTech Week, on how A.I., tokenization and quantum computing are changing finance. The HKMA gives the topics, not what Beau said. It also launched Project SAGE on agentic finance and a tConnect Launchpad with Cyberport for testing tokenization ideas.
Open questions and next dates
Four things would turn Monday’s announcement into something measurable: the first figure for transactions settled in tokenized central bank money, a list of which of the 12 banks are live, a start date for stablecoin trials, and a statement on what follows the pilot now that 2026 is nearly over.
On the European side, the dates are firmer: longer Pontes hours by mid-2027, then 24/7/365 in 2028, with the Appia blueprint due by that year. Hong Kong FinTech Week runs until 6 November, which leaves the HKMA this week to add detail.