China’s retail titans are coming for the crypto industry. According to Reuters, JD.com and Ant Group have been pressing the People’s Bank of China (PBC) to green-light offshore yuan stablecoins that could launch first in Hong Kong and later roll into mainland pilot zones.

Retail Giants Lobby For Offshore Yuan Tokens

Executives told regulators that dollar-denominated stablecoins have become the go-to medium for cross-border settlement, leaving Chinese firms at a strategic disadvantage. Offshore-yuan backing, they argue, would skirt Beijing’s strict capital-control regime while still giving exporters and traders a currency they trust.

JD.com is already preparing licence applications in Hong Kong and Singapore, while Ant International says it will seek approval through Alipay’s global arm.

The timing syncs with Hong Kong’s new licensing framework for stablecoin issuers, set to kick in on 1 August under the city’s “LEAP” digital-asset roadmap. Regulators hope the regime can foster real-world payment use cases—something even the dollar market has struggled to unlock.

A New Challenger in the Stablecoin Sector

Yuan enthusiasm is rising just as the currency’s share of global payments has slipped to 2.89%, while the dollar still commands 48%.

Former Bank of China deputy Wang Yongli warns that unless yuan transfers become as frictionless as dollar tokens, Beijing risks ceding yet more ground. PBOC governor Pan Gongsheng has floated an “international digital-yuan operations centre” in Shanghai to build a multipolar currency system.

For now, all top-ten stablecoins are dollar-pegged, led by Tether (USDT) with $158.5 billion market cap. The biggest non-USD stablecoin, the euro-pegged EURC, ranks 11th among stablecoins and 181th among all tokens, with market cap of $205.9 million.

Whether the new yuan-pegged stablecoin will clear the regulatory hurdles in its way remains to be seen. However, even in this case, the new entrant is unlikely to contest Tether’s leadership any time soon.

Trusted by prominent institutions and millions of retail investors around the globe, USDT ranks directly behind BTC and ETH and ahead of XRP in terms of market cap. Nonetheless, the yuan-pegged stablecoin has a decent chance to rise to prominence in the Asia-Pacific region, offering a localized source of value backed by China’s economic might.