Digital assets Reality check on digital assets – regulatory tailwinds building, but operating headwinds persist

Research evidence excerpt

Digital assets Reality check on digital assets – regulatory tailwinds building, but operating headwinds persist

Asia Pacific Equity Research

18 May 2026

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Digital assets

Reality check on digital assets – regulatory tailwinds

building, but operating headwinds persist

We have seen positive developments in the digital assets industry in recent months. Banks & Financial Services

In Hong Kong SAR, there has been positive progress on stablecoins. The first AC Katherine Lei

batch of stablecoin licenses has been issued to HSBC and Anchorpoint (a (852) 2800-8552

Standard Chartered subsidiary), and the HKMA chief signaled the potential katherine.lei@jpmorgan.com

issuance of a second batch of licenses. Separately, the SFC in Hong Kong has Peter Zhang

permitted secondary trading of tokenized ETFs, with measures introduced to (852) 2800-8557

improve liquidity. In the US, the Senate Banking Committee has advanced the peter.zhang@jpmorgan.com

CLARITY Act, with the White House targeting final passage before 4 July. BTC Lincoln Yu

and ETH prices remain volatile but have both rebounded from this year's troughs. (852) 2800 8523

Nonetheless, HashKey's share price has corrected 6% QTD to a trough level of lincoln.yu@jpmorgan.com

J.P. Morgan Securities (Asia Pacific) Limited/

~HK$3.9 since listing. Thus, despite our expectation that the 1H26 operating trend J.P. Morgan Broking (Hong Kong) Limited

will be challenging, we see upside risk in the near term.