Just now! Hong Kong has fired the first shot in sovereign stablecoins, with $USDT being fully cleared out. A war of currencies without gunfire has already begun.

If 2024 is the year Bitcoin ETF breaks through, and 2025 is the year of regulatory reshaping, then the script for 2026 has already been written at a conference in Hong Kong. The era of chaos has ended, and a financial machine driven by national power, decentralized technology, and silicon-based life is beginning to operate precisely.

Based on observations of 11,000 attendees, three core consensus points have emerged. The first concerns AI and financial sovereignty. The strongest shock at the event came from the inversion of subject-object relationships. The narrative is no longer about humans using AI to trade, but about AI leveraging crypto to reconstruct production relations.

They are autonomously issuing tokens, managing funds, and even hiring humans on the chain. Whether it’s Rentahuman, which exploded earlier this year, or ETH’s new ERC-8004 protocol, they are all trying to close the loop on this “silicon-based financial supply chain.” ETH, Base, SOL, and even Virtuals designed specifically for AI are competing for the same throne: becoming the preferred settlement network for silicon-based life.

Hong Kong Financial Secretary Paul Chan precisely depicted this vision in his speech: as AI agents can make independent decisions, we will see the early form of a “machine economy.” By 2026, the most active on-chain addresses will no longer be human whales, but tireless AI agents. Crypto is becoming the native bank account for AI.

The second consensus is the chaos among stablecoins, with Hong Kong taking the lead in onshore counterattack. Field visits reveal a dramatic contrast: street crypto exchange shops are opening more and more, but the most prominent counters are posting “expulsion orders”—completely stopping sales of USD stablecoins like USDT and USDC.

This is not spontaneous business behavior but a long-planned cleanup. Paul Chan revealed at the conference that Hong Kong plans to issue its first small batch of stablecoin issuer licenses this March. This is a sharp political and economic signal.

Just two weeks ago, Tether bowed to US regulation and launched a compliant version, USAT. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, to counteract the siphoning of Asian liquidity by USD stablecoins, Hong Kong responded strongly. From the EU’s MiCA ban on non-compliant USD stablecoins, to Hong Kong’s big move in March, and to the ten major European banks leading the upcoming euro stablecoin launch in the second half of the year, a clear front line has been drawn.

Hong Kong is using both physical and legal means to cut off offshore USD stablecoin circulation, paving the way for its own Hong Kong dollar stablecoin army. By 2026, stablecoins will no longer be gambling chips in crypto casinos but digital nuclear weapons in great power financial games.

The third consensus is to say goodbye to self-indulgence; real applications that can be scaled up are the only way forward. Whether it’s Lily Liu from Solana Foundation or executives from BitGo, the consensus at the roundtable is: the TPS race for L1/L2 is meaningless, and infrastructure is severely oversupplied.

The true winners are those applications that can embed crypto “silently” into Web2 scenarios. Paradigm shifts are happening: first, seamless integration, like PayPal’s $PYUSD reaching hundreds of millions of users via Venmo; second, global deployment, such as protocols like Aeon Pay penetrating worldwide payment networks through on-chain QR code payments.

Vitalik Buterin has recently emphasized multiple times that the industry should stop incentivizing “buying” user attention with tokens and focus instead on the real effectiveness of applications. Stablecoins, AI agents, prediction markets, RWA—these tracks are tasked with connecting decentralized finance to the physical world.

The mood conveyed at this conference is calm but brutal. The era of crypto getting rich quick by writing a few Ponzi codes is over. As old money’s heavy artillery enters the scene, and AI agents execute strategies 24/7, the window for retail investors and traditional developers is closing.

But at the same time, the great voyage of “silicon-based finance” and “borderless compliant payments” has just begun.