Hong Kong Monetary Authority announced today the launch of the second phase of the "Digital Hong Kong Dollar" pilot program to further explore innovative use cases for the digital currency in Hong Kong. The HKMA completed the first phase of the pilot program in October last year, studying local retail use cases in various areas such as programmable payments, tokenized asset settlement, and offline payments. Based on the results and experience of the first phase of the pilot program, the second phase will delve deeper into some of the experiments of the first phase, namely the three unique characteristics that the "Digital Hong Kong Dollar" may bring, including programmability, tokenization, and real-time settlement, and explore new use cases not included in the first phase.

Hang Seng Bank  and international management consulting firm Oliver Wyman jointly released the "Prospect of Programmable Payments" report, which emphasizes that if the Hong Kong Monetary Authority decides to launch digital Hong Kong dollars, the government and industry need to work together to develop a sound digital Hong Kong dollar infrastructure plan, encourage customer-oriented innovation, maintain healthy market competition, and pay attention to information protection, privacy, and network security issues related to digital Hong Kong dollars. The report also stated that in order to encourage more small and medium-sized merchants and government agencies to adopt digital Hong Kong dollars, practical obstacles must be overcome and the process must be streamlined. The large-scale promotion of programmable functions may also face certain challenges in the implementation process, so when designing programmable functions, user experience, system performance and risk management should be given priority.