HSBC launches RCHKD in Hong Kong, and the Riksbank weighs an e-krona again

The day outside Cardano and Bitcoin opened with a stablecoin in Hong Kong. HSBC launched RCHKD, pegged 1:1 to the Hong Kong dollar. More than 3.3 million PayMe users can activate a wallet. HSBC received an issuer licence in April, together with Anchorpoint Financial. The announced next steps are HSBC HK Mobile Banking and a tokenized HKD money-market fund.

Sweden and Korea

The Riksbank warns that foreign stablecoins and a digital euro, possible as early as 2029, can crowd out the krona. Deputy governor Per Jansson wants legal preparation. Building an e-krona would take at least five years. Only 5 percent of Swedes paid for their last purchase in cash. That is Kriptoteme's reading of CoinDesk and Reuters.

From 3 December South Korea reports cross-border crypto transfers. The rules cover private wallets as well. Comments are accepted until 26 October. Blockzeit reports that the Digital Asset Basic Act has been finalized. Yesterday that statute was still in final talks.

Ethereum, CoinDCX, and the rest of the day

Ethereum delayed the Glamsterdam test on Hoodi, planned for 26 October, with no new date. According to ChainSecurity, EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 raise the cost of a new storage slot to as much as 110,020 gas instead of 22,100. Cointelegraph cites 13 potentially affected contracts. Sepolia passed on 6 October. A mainnet date is unconfirmed. A separate proposal shortens finality from about 16 minutes to about 4. According to the Ethereum Foundation, a service moving about $1 million an hour would have about $67,000 tied up instead of about $267,000. There is no activation date.

About $16 million, mostly USDT and TRX on Tron, left addresses linked to CoinDCX. The exchange says those are old addresses compromised in the July 2025 hack. ZachXBT disputes that because the address kept receiving deposits for about 10 months after the hack. CoinDCX acknowledges an operational failure and says affected users were credited. Antoine Poinsot at Bitcoin Core introduces a category of vulnerabilities that are easy to discover, for example with an LLM query: they are patched immediately on every maintained version, with disclosure at the same time. Lower severities are published two weeks after the release that contains the fix; critical ones are handled ad hoc. In August the Bitcoin Red Team reported nearly 5,000 possible issues across 390 projects. The Central Bank of Ireland fined Coinbase Ireland €3.25 million over client-asset safeguarding and outsourcing supervision. During the Silvergate crisis in 2023, funds of 30 users were commingled, and the safeguarding account was underfunded by 0.54 percent on average. Coinbase says no user lost money.

OCC stablecoin rules take effect on 18 January 2027, but the date applications open is unpublished because OMB approval of the forms is still pending. An exemption of up to 12 months is available only with a substantially complete application. The GENIUS Act was adopted on 18 July 2025. Thailand's SEC has had rules for local spot BTC and ETH ETFs since last Friday, but no application has been filed and it cannot confirm a first approval in 2026.

Sources: Kriptoteme, RCHKD, Cointelegraph, HSBC, Kriptoteme, e-krona, crypto.news, Korea, Blockzeit, DABA, Kriptoteme, Glamsterdam, Cointelegraph, Glamsterdam, Kriptoteme, finality, Kriptoteme, CoinDCX, Kriptoteme, Bitcoin Core, Cointelegraph, Bitcoin Core, Kriptoteme, Coinbase Ireland, Kriptoteme, GENIUS, Kriptoteme, Thailand.