Stablecoin Dual-Track Game: Hong Kong's Scene Breakthrough and America's Regulatory Hegemony
On both sides of the Pacific, the wrestling of digital finance is taking two forms: Hong Kong is tearing apart the B-end market with the industrial scene as the spearhead, and the United States is using the legislative framework to build a moat of rules. The essence of this contest for the discourse power of the global payment system is the collision of two paradigms: "bottom-up scene penetration" and "top-down standard output".
1. Eastern Battlefield: Scene Breakthrough of Industrial Clusters
The countdown to the entry into force of Hong Kong's "Stablecoin Act" on August 1 is giving rise to a unique "license rush phenomenon". Ant Group took the lead in launching the license application, and Lianlian Digital set up a special team to lay out technical verification; Yuta Logistics plans to launch "RBTC", which is anchored to Bitcoin, in an attempt to open up a new track in the field of digital asset exchange. The most strategically ambitious is JD.com, which proposes a "global license strategy", aiming to reduce cross-border payment costs by 90% and improve efficiency to 10 seconds, directly pointing to the trillion-level blue ocean of corporate exchange. Relying on the high-frequency settlement scenario of the Yiwu market, the Commodity City will also enter the track through the "Yiwu Payment" platform, showing the ambition of the integration of physical industry and digital finance.
The underlying logic of this "B-end breakthrough" model is to empower stablecoins with real trade scenarios. JD Coin Chain has completed functional testing of the Hong Kong dollar stablecoin and is extending application scenarios to cross-border payments, supply chain finance, and self-operated e-commerce. Its killer feature lies in the ecological closed loop—when stablecoin payments are connected with international logistics and overseas warehouse data, the fragmented chain of "payment-logistics-settlement" in traditional trade will be reshaped into a real-time and trustworthy data flow.
II. Western Front: Rule Games with Legislation First
Unlike Hong Kong's "scene-driven" approach, the development of stablecoins in the United States resembles a legislative experiment. Circle once faced difficulties due to its SPAC merger in 2022, exposing the risks of regulatory gray areas; it wasn't until the introduction of the "GENIUS Act" that it paved the way for compliance, positioning itself as the "Digital Dollar Agreement" to enter the capital market. The essence of this "mainstream conspiracy" is to embed USDC into the traditional financial system through legislation—Bernstein analysts refer to it as the "Internet Currency Track" plan, which aims to make stablecoins the underlying settlement protocol for banks and payment platforms.
Data shows that over $120 billion in US Treasury bonds are locked up as stablecoin reserves, with Tether and Circle collectively holding an 86% market share. This scale advantage allows them to attempt to establish "rule hegemony": by means of top-level designs such as the "Crypto Act", they aim to shape USDC into the "universal language" of global digital finance, essentially extending the hegemony of the US dollar into the Web3 era.
3. The Ultimate Showdown: Ecological Barriers vs. Network Effects
The moat of the JD model lies in "scene stickiness." When stablecoin payments are embedded in the millions of order flows of Yiwu Small Commodities City, or in the cross-border settlement links of JD Worldwide, what is constructed is not just a single payment tool, but a "trust machine" that covers the entire trade process. In the future, if an offshore RMB stablecoin (CNH) is issued, it may become a new type of infrastructure for the internationalization of the RMB.
Circle's trump card is "protocol dominance." Once USDC becomes a digital equivalent for interbank settlement through legislation, its network effect will crush vertical scenarios—much like the SWIFT system's monopoly on traditional cross-border payments. However, Cathie Wood's fund recently reduced its holdings in CRCL stocks, which also suggests caution from capital regarding "policy benefit exhaustion": the real test will be the commercialization after the rules are implemented.
The ultimate proposition of this game lies in: the future of digital finance, will it be defined by the "scenario ecology" that addresses real pain points, or dominated by the "protocol hegemony" that establishes universal rules? Perhaps, as the distributed spirit of blockchain suggests, the two paths will eventually converge in competition — Hong Kong's practices inject the genes of the real economy into stablecoins, while the United States' explorations provide samples of institutional innovation. The real breakthrough point may be hidden in the experimental field of "regulatory sandbox + industrial scenarios" where the two intersect. #BTC#0192837464656574839201
