Hong Kong's Digital Asset Clearing Center raises US$10m to build tokenised settlement rails
The plumbing of cross-border settlement is becoming a contested frontier for tokenised finance, and Hong Kong is positioning itself at the centre of it. Digital Asset Clearing Center (DACC.HK) has raised US$10 million from a group of strategic investors to build market infrastructure that links tokenised and digital assets to the payment systems banks already rely on.
The backers are notable for what they represent rather than the headline figure. They include blockchain network Conflux, Transaction Technologies Limited and Global InfoTech, alongside a wider group spanning Fosun International, Blockstone, Avior Capital, Fintec World, Satoshi Ventures and BridgeTower. The pitch is that each brings a slice of existing financial infrastructure that DACC can wire into a tokenised settlement layer rather than build from scratch.
Why the clearing layer matters
Cross-border payments remain a US$214 trillion market still dominated by traditional bank transfers, with the familiar drag of multi-day settlement, high costs and fragmented data. DACC is targeting that gap with what it calls Clearing-as-a-Service, offering financial institutions connections to systems including the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), blockchain networks and compliance infrastructure. The product set covers stablecoin and tokenised-deposit rails, KYC and AML checks, and a distributed-ledger wallet that sits alongside conventional banking and exchange services.
For banks, the interesting detail is the insistence on compliance and regulatory readiness rather than disintermediation. The firm is anticipating Hong Kong's forthcoming Securities and Futures Commission virtual-asset custody licence, framing the territory's regulatory maturity as the reason to base settlement infrastructure there.
A China gateway play
The strategic logic is geographic as much as technical. "With our headquarters in Hong Kong, Digital Asset Clearing Center is positioned at the intersection of global finance and China's gateway," said Larry Li, director and former chief executive of Swift North Asia, pointing to the CIPS integration as the bridge to mainland flows.
Co-founder and chairwoman Serra Wei framed the ambition more broadly. "My vision is for Digital Asset Clearing Center to develop a compliant financial settlement and clearing infrastructure that can integrate digital and tokenized assets into mainstream capital markets," she said. Whether incumbent clearing networks cede ground to that model is the open question the US$10 million is meant to begin answering.
Source: FF News.
