HKMA Moves Ensemble TX to 24/7 Interbank Settlement in Tokenised Central Bank Money, With 12 Banks Now in the Pilot

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority said on 2 November that banks in its Ensemble TX pilot can now settle tokenised deposit transactions with each other around the clock in tokenised central bank money; Standard Chartered launched tokenised deposits for corporate clients on the rail and BOCHK reported more than HK$2.3 billion in real-value transactions to end-October.

HKMA Moves Ensemble TX to 24/7 Interbank Settlement in Tokenised Central Bank Money, With 12 Banks Now in the Pilot — editorial cover artwork
HKMA Moves Ensemble TX to 24/7 Interbank Settlement in Tokenised Central Bank Money, With 12 Banks Now in the Pilot — editorial cover artwork

By Lucas Ferreira, Journalist, Crypto Infrastructure

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) said on 2 November 2026 that Ensemble TX, the pilot phase of Project Ensemble, now supports interbank settlement of tokenised deposit transactions in tokenised central bank money on a 24/7 basis. Participation has grown to 12 banks and 20 industry pioneers. Until now the pilot settled between banks through Hong Kong's HKD Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system, which runs on conventional operating hours.

The change was announced at Hong Kong FinTech Week, alongside the same-day launch of Standard Chartered's tokenised deposits for corporate clients in Hong Kong. Ensemble TX remains a pilot: the HKMA describes real-value transactions "under a controlled pilot environment", not a general market service.

What changes for the banks

Ensemble TX launched in November 2025. Banks issued tokenised deposits that pioneer clients used for corporate treasury management and tokenised money market fund transactions, but when value moved from one bank to another the interbank leg still settled over RTGS. The HKMA has now put a tokenised form of central bank money underneath that leg, so a tokenised deposit transfer between two participating banks can settle at any hour.

The HKMA names Bank of China (Hong Kong), China Construction Bank (Asia), ICBC (Asia), Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong) and HSBC among the participating banks, and Ant International, BlackRock and China Asset Management (Hong Kong) among the pioneers. The full lists sit in annexes the press release refers to.

"In just two years, Project Ensemble has transitioned from experimentation and piloting to a new phase focused on promoting the commercialisation of tokenisation applications in Hong Kong," said Eddie Yue, the HKMA's chief executive. Julia Leung, chief executive of the Securities and Futures Commission, said tokenised deposits "can now power around-the-clock transactions, including corporate treasury management and secondary trading of tokenised funds on licensed platforms."

Banks' first numbers

The participating banks published their own updates the same day. These are bank statements, not HKMA data:

Bank — What it announced on 2 November

Standard Chartered — Launched its Tokenised Deposits solution for corporate clients in Hong Kong, the first market in the group; China AMC, Finloop and PantherTrade have executed live tokenised deposit transactions and tokenised money market fund settlement; Fireblocks partnership; HashKey joins the ecosystem

BOCHK — More than HK$2.3 billion in real-value transactions on Ensemble TX as at the end of October; first real-time cross-border and interbank transfers for Ant International using tokenised deposits

CCB (Asia) — Launched a tokenised deposit platform and connected to the 24/7 central bank digital currency platform for cross-bank clearing and reconciliation

Standard Chartered said the interbank leg can settle in central bank money "including wholesale central bank digital currency ('wCBDC')", and that it plans to take the solution to more markets over time, without naming them or giving dates.

Bills now, stablecoins next

In its wider FinTech Week statement, the HKMA said Recognised Dealers have completed trial trades of tokenised Exchange Fund Bills in the secondary market, and that it "will soon expand the trials to include regulated stablecoins". It gave no date and did not say which licensed issuers would take part. It also launched tConnect Launchpad with Cyberport to test tokenisation use cases.

The sequencing matters. Hong Kong now has tokenised commercial bank money settling in tokenised central bank money around the clock, a tokenised government bill being traded between dealers, and licensed HKD stablecoins from HSBC and Anchorpoint in the market. The next trial would put the third of those on the same rails as the first two. That is a different design from markets where stablecoins and bank deposits run on separate networks and meet only through conversion.

The constraint is scale. Twelve banks, and HK$2.3 billion processed by one of them since the pilot began, is modest for a market of Hong Kong's size, and every transaction still runs inside a supervised pilot. What 24/7 settlement in central bank money removes is the timing gap: when a corporate treasurer moves tokenised deposits between banks on a Saturday, the banks no longer carry each other's exposure until RTGS reopens. Standard Chartered describes this as "significantly reducing counterparty risk as value moves between financial institutions".

Sources

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