BlackRock, Standard Chartered Hong Kong and Mastercard form a tripartite alliance to participate in the Hong Kong Monetary Authority's Digital Hong Kong Dollar Phase II Pilot Program

Standard Chartered Hong Kong, BlackRock and Mastercard will join forces to participate in the second phase of the Digital Hong Kong Dollar pilot program announced by the HKMA in March this year. The HKMA also renamed the Digital Hong Kong Dollar project to the Digital Hong Kong Dollar Plus project, which the participating institutions welcomed. The project covers a wider range of innovative use cases of digital currency for individual and corporate users, including digital Hong Kong dollars and tokenized deposits. The newly formed three-party alliance will explore the use case of tokenized investment in an end-to-end manner. This potential solution allows investors to purchase tokenized assets and settle transactions directly with relevant asset managers through digital Hong Kong dollars or tokenized deposits. Libeara, which was incubated by Standard Chartered Group's SC Ventures, will work with Standard Chartered Hong Kong and BlackRock to provide a platform to jointly promote the potential issuance of tokenized assets through Mastercard's "Multi-Token Network". The "Multi-Token Network" is a set of foundational technologies designed to enhance the security, scalability and interoperability of transactions within the digital asset and blockchain ecosystem. Man Wai-shing, head of wealth management and retail banking at Standard Chartered Hong Kong, said the bank looks forward to exploring the potential value that this innovative technology can bring to customers and contributing to the development of Hong Kong's digital currency ecosystem. (Hong Kong Economic Journal)