Ant chairman touts ‘tokenised money’ for settlement but remains mum on stablecoin plans

Ant Group chairman Eric Jing Xiandong touted the company’s tokenisation progress and lauded blockchain’s increased role in financial services at Hong Kong Fintech Week this year, but made no mention of its stalled stablecoin pursuit as regulators move to rein in speculative activities.

Ant has used tokenised bank deposits to achieve cross-bank real-time settlement this year through the Hong Kong government’s Project Ensemble, Jing said on Monday at the city’s largest fintech conference.

Speaking on the same panel with the Hong Kong government’s Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury Christopher Hui Ching-yu, Jing said that last year Ant achieved real-time settlement across different branches of a global bank – without naming which one – as part of the sandbox.

“That’s really given a huge, huge confidence that through tokenised deposits and tokenised money, [we could] really achieve real-time global settlement,” Jing said.

Project Ensemble was launched in August last year with the aim of exploring different use cases for tokenisation, which refers to the process of creating representations of traditional assets on a blockchain to allow faster and cheaper transactions. Ant Digital Technologies, a unit of Ant Group that began operating independently last year, is a participant in the sandbox.

Ant is an affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the Post.