Just now! Hong Kong has fired the first shot in sovereign stablecoins, as $USDT was physically cleared out. A digital currency war has already begun.

If 2024 is the year Bitcoin ETF breaks into Wall Street’s mainstream, and 2025 is the year of regulatory reshaping, then the script for the beginning of 2026 has already been rewritten at a conference in Hong Kong. No longer are there legends of rogue heroes; instead, a sophisticated financial machine driven by national power, decentralized protocols, and silicon-based intelligent agents has taken center stage.

Through sensing the emotions of over 11,000 attendees and tracking dozens of closed-door meetings, market observers have distilled three emerging core consensus points.

The first consensus concerns the future. The debate over AGI is endless, but a new standard is being established: AI without independent financial sovereignty is merely a tool of humans. The most intense shock at the conference stemmed from a complete inversion of subject-object relationships. The narrative is no longer about humans using AI for trading, but about AI leveraging crypto to reconstruct production relations — autonomously issuing tokens on-chain, managing funds, and even beginning to hire humans to work for it.

Whether it’s the viral “AI hiring humans” application at the start of the year or ETH’s newly launched ERC-8004 protocol, leading developers are fully building this “silicon-based financial supply chain.” Today, ETH, Base, SOL, and even the Virtuals network designed specifically for AI are competing for the same goal: becoming the preferred settlement layer for silicon-based life. This is not just a technological celebration but has also received official endorsement. Hong Kong Financial Secretary Paul Chan depicted this precisely in his keynote: “As AI agents can make independent decisions and execute them, we will see the early forms of a ‘machine economy.’”

By 2026, the most active on-chain addresses may no longer be human whales but tireless AI agents. Crypto is becoming the native bank for AI, and humans may be reduced to the “flesh API” for AI.

The second consensus is more pragmatic and fiery. On the streets of Hong Kong, a dramatic contrast is unfolding: more and more crypto exchanges are opening, yet the most prominent counters are uniformly posting notices that they are suspending all sales of USD stablecoins like USDT and USDC. This is not spontaneous but a long-planned “clearing operation.”

The mystery was revealed on the main stage: Hong Kong plans to issue its first batch of stablecoin issuer licenses this March. This is a sharp political and economic signal. Two weeks ago, Tether bowed to US regulators by launching a compliant version of USAT, attempting to effortlessly absorb Wall Street. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, Hong Kong responded with the strongest measures to counter the siphoning of Asian liquidity by US dollar stablecoins.

This has gone beyond mere crypto compliance and evolved into a currency sovereignty defense war. From the EU’s MiCA ban on non-compliant dollar stablecoins to Hong Kong’s upcoming “big move,” and the European mainstream banks’ planned euro stablecoin release in the second half of the year, the battle lines are clear. Hong Kong is using both legal and physical means to clear the way for the upcoming compliant Hong Kong dollar stablecoin. In 2026, stablecoins will no longer be casino chips but digital weapons in great power financial games.

The third consensus points to the survival rules of the industry. Whether it’s the SOL Foundation or executives at BitGo, a rare consensus was reached in the roundtable: the TPS race between L1 and L2 is meaningless now; infrastructure is severely oversupplied. The winners in 2026 will be those applications that can embed crypto “silently” into the existing world.

Paradigm shifts are happening. For example, the success of $PYUSD is not because of itself but because it seamlessly reaches hundreds of millions of users via Venmo; protocols like Aeon Pay are quietly infiltrating payment networks in eight countries through on-chain QR code payments, with users unaware of blockchain presence. ETH co-founder Vitalik Buterin has recently emphasized multiple times that the industry should stop incentivizing “buying” users with tokens and focus instead on real utility.

Stablecoins, AI agents, prediction markets, RWA — these tracks are tasked with connecting decentralized finance to the physical world. They are the underlying arteries, not isolated speculative assets.

The mood conveyed at this conference is calm yet brutal. Crypto is entering a new phase; the era of getting rich quick with Ponzi-like schemes is over. As traditional financial forces enter the scene and AI agents begin executing strategies 24/7, the window for retail investors and independent developers is closing. But at the same time, the grand voyage of “silicon-based finance” and “borderless compliant payments” has only just begun.