The Disappearing Buy Button

The financial boundaries between nations seem complex, but for individual accounts, it often comes down to just a button.

After June 12, 2026, mainland Chinese users of China's largest brokerages, Futu and Tiger, opened their US stock brokerage accounts. Their holdings and assets were still there, and they could still sell and transfer funds out, but they could no longer deposit, buy, or add to positions.

When capital begins to show tendencies of escaping state control, regulatory tightening often restricts individuals' space for choosing and allocating assets first.

This cleanup by China of cross-border brokerages' US stock business recalls the crypto crackdown nearly a decade ago. Both actions comprehensively tightened financial exposures that had long-term adverse effects on national local liquidity and strictly defined the asset channels available to onshore users.

For many Chinese families, this channel represents more than just investment needs. After slowing wage growth and a significant shrinkage in the value of Chinese real estate, allocating to high-quality global enterprises might be one of the few pathways remaining in the next twenty years to change the trajectory of Chinese family wealth. Now, this path is also narrowing.

China's Great Wall of Capital

The "Implementation Plan for Comprehensive Rectification of Illegal Cross-Border Securities, Futures, and Fund Operating Activities," jointly released by the China Securities Regulatory Commission and seven other departments, is very clear: all illegal cross-border investment activities will be completely shut down within two years. Effective immediately, opening new accounts and capital inflows are prohibited. Existing funds are only allowed to be fully transferred out within two years. Furthermore, apart from financial services, all supporting facilities and services surrounding cross-border investment, including information exposure on domestic networks, are comprehensively prohibited.

Meanwhile, Futu and Tiger were fined 1.85 billion (270 million USD) and 410 million (60.7 million USD) RMB respectively. Their stock prices plummeted by 45% and 30% respectively in pre-market trading, declaring the formal end of the era where users within China could freely trade US stocks on the edge of regulation.

In fact, this is not a single sudden event. In recent years, China has been gradually tightening previously legal pathways for RMB outbound investment, starting from warnings to rectifying brokerages:

• 2021/11: CSRC summoned senior executives of Futu (FUTU) and Tiger (TIGR)
• 2022/12: The two companies were characterized as operating illegally, prohibited from opening new mainland accounts
• 2023/5: Apps removed from mainland app stores
• 2026/5: Formal investigation launched + joint rectification by eight departments

To maintain the autonomy of the RMB exchange rate and monetary policy, capital controls have long been China's strategic framework for countering US dollar hegemony. Restrictions on cross-border investment are just one part of this. The goal of the Beijing authorities is clear: money earned within China should feed back into the local economy and cannot flow out indefinitely.

For any financial activity that contradicts national strategy, or even involves the best local innovative enterprises, the priority of the Beijing authorities is always financial stability and onshore currency hegemony above all else:

• Comprehensive ban on cryptocurrency: Forced a large number of Chinese miners holding advanced data center designs and energy integration capabilities to go overseas; forced the world's largest cryptocurrency to go overseas
• Interference in ByteDance's TikTok sale case in the US: Forced ByteDance to cut off its highest-quality assets and indefinitely postpone the parent company's listing plans
• Vetoed Manus acquisition: Forced Manus to seek support from local Chinese capital instead and explore the possibility of listing in Hong Kong

Tough regulation is not only about restricting capital flow but also about preventing the outflow of key resources such as technology, talent, data, and supply chains. Keeping these core elements within the country and then supporting local enterprises with domestic funds is the only way to enhance national competitiveness from the ground up.

In the previous round of globalization, China could still stand out by relying on the manufacturing supply chain; but in the AI era, China faces not only OpenAI and Anthropic but also tech giants like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet that have survived the internet bubble. They not only have over a decade of technical accumulation but also rely on the huge US capital market. In terms of financing and leveraging financial leverage, the gap with Chinese enterprises may be more than two orders of magnitude. Therefore, keeping liquidity and private capital onshore and concentrating funds to support local tech enterprises is China's current top priority.

Tough financial rectification efforts, coupled with a series of support measures for the Hong Kong stock market and the A-share STAR Market, strategically encourage enterprises with core technologies and data sensitivity to prioritize listing on A-shares or in Hong Kong rather than issuing ADRs in the US. This has led Chinese entrepreneurs to follow Beijing's choice of "East Rising, West Falling" capital operations: In 2025, the total IPO amount in Hong Kong was about 285 billion HKD (36 billion USD), ranking first globally since 2019, far exceeding the second-place Nasdaq's 27.5 billion USD. The proportion of enterprises listed on both A-shares and Hong Kong shares is also continuing to rise, accounting for nearly 60% by the first half of this year.

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It is evident that the Hong Kong Stock Exchange is being built into a center for Chinese-funded enterprises to absorb global liquidity, while keeping governance rights firmly in Chinese hands.

Therefore, this comprehensive cleanup of US stock brokerages is not just about preventing local capital from continuing to provide valuation premiums to the US capital market. Given that China has already missed the first-mover advantage in the AI industry, the strategic significance behind this step may far surpass all past capital control measures.

Anxious Chinese Retail Investors

According to the MSCI World Index factsheet at the end of June 2026, the top ten constituents collectively accounted for 25.74% of the index weight, almost all of which are US tech and AI-related companies. These companies hold ownership of future cash flows such as AI computing power, cloud platforms, chips, ad networks, operating systems, consumer portals, electric vehicles, and satellite internet. The distribution system of global productive assets is concentrated in the hands of a few companies. This extreme concentration has led to a "siphon effect" of global passive capital. Since passive index funds allocate strictly according to market capitalization weighting, in any new global liquidity (such as fixed investments by pension funds of various countries, sovereign wealth fund allocations), nearly 26 out of every 100 USD mechanically flows into these 10 US tech companies. This further pushes up their valuation premiums, granting them nearly endless low-cost financing advantages in the real world to merge, acquire, conduct R&D, and ultimately completely lock in future core digital and physical assets.

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When one-quarter of global economic growth is captured by these companies, ordinary Chinese people have no simple means to catch this most obvious era beta.

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The industrial distribution of China's A-shares, however, looks completely different. In the history of the CSI 300, the Financials sector has long occupied an absolute dominant position, with weights often maintained between 20% and 30%. However, from late 2025 to early 2026, the weight of the Information Technology sector achieved a historic overtaking for the first time, officially surpassing the Financials sector to become the industry with the largest weight in A-shares.

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Over the past twenty years, the growth engine of China's economy was "real estate + infrastructure," which required extremely massive credit expansion. Banks and non-bank financial institutions became the largest cash flow centers, occupying a dominant position in the index. However, the macro structure has undergone fundamental changes in recent years, well reflecting the resonance of national strategic will with Chinese characteristics and structural liquidity guidance:

1. Shift in credit cycle: With control over local debt and real estate leverage, the balance sheet expansion speed of the traditional financial sector has slowed significantly, and the valuation center has shifted downward.
2. Central bank structural liquidity: In the past year, a large number of structural monetary policy tools (such as re-lending for technological innovation) were precisely deployed. Liquidity was directly injected into hard tech, domestic substitution of semiconductors, and high-end manufacturing fields.
3. Capital pricing of "New Quality Productive Forces": The capital market is repricing for "autonomous and controllable" and "self-reliance and self-strengthening in technology." Companies in fields such as computing infrastructure, semiconductor equipment, and high-end materials have obtained extremely high valuation premiums and capital tilt.

This lag is reflected not only in the proportion of industrial structure in the index but also in stock market performance. Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, China, as the world's second-largest economy, has ranked last in stock market gains among the top five economies. Chinese retail investors can only hold limited investment quotas in their accounts, watching themselves being excluded from the new wealth system.

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The demand for cross-border investment within China is not just so-called "worshiping foreign things," but rather that with the mediocre performance of local Chinese tech enterprises and the sharp shrinkage of real estate, the sense of relative deprivation in wealth has pushed retail investors' anxiety to the peak. ETFs tracking overseas markets even saw premiums as high as 10% in A-shares this year.

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From a national level, capital controls can prevent domestic liquidity from strengthening foreign enterprises and instead support the growth of "local enterprises," avoiding AI supply chains being monopolized by foreign countries and keeping asset pricing power in their own hands; but for individual investors, it does not matter which country high-quality productive assets come from, they only care about whether they can buy these targets.

When the demands of the state and individuals diverge, this gap precisely gives crypto a new development opportunity.

Brokering the unbrokered

Over the past 15 years, the main narrative axis of crypto has been banked the unbanked: allowing people without bank accounts to access payment, savings, lending, and advanced currency systems. This narrative remains important, but the next frontier opportunity is to allow these people without bank accounts to further enter the distribution system of global core assets.

In the past year, the market cap of tokenized stocks grew by over 1.3 billion USD. In June 2026, SpaceX drove the monthly trading volume of tokenized stocks to break through 3.4 billion USD; RWA perpetual contract trading on trade.xyz exceeded 6 billion USD in a single day.

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Even though this volume still has a very large gap with the traditional US stock market, it is enough to prove that the liquidity of tokenized assets on-chain has begun to activate, accessible by global users, tradable 24/7, and continuously priced after traditional market closures.

In time, these tokenized assets may also be mortgaged, lent, and combined into new asset structures like crypto's native assets today, growing into an alternative asset distribution layer, providing a new broker system for those excluded by traditional finance.

Today it is Chinese retail investors who are blocked outside the door; tomorrow it might be Latin American users without US brokerage accounts, Asian users without qualified investor status, Middle Eastern users restricted by their own country's capital controls, or just a young person who does not want their asset boundaries decided by the local financial system. Therefore, the next big opportunity for crypto may not be making another faster wallet or a cheaper exchange, but creating new asset entry points, repackaging, pricing, and distributing global productive assets.

Capital Flow in the AI Era

In the AI era, brokered the unbrokered is bidirectional.

This also applies to enterprises. Whoever can lock in future capital investment, scarce physical resources, and market attention globally in advance is more likely to establish a moat before competitors. US enterprises have long been first-class citizens in asset issuance, enjoying privileges in financing everywhere around the globe.

Large US tech companies possess balance sheets and credit ratings superior to many sovereign nations. They are utilizing this privilege, playing the role of "macro hedge funds." When the Bank of Japan (BOJ) or central banks in other regions maintain a relatively loose interest rate environment for a long time, and USD funding costs are high, they will engage in corporate-level carry trades, locking borrowing costs at extremely low levels of 1% or even lower. The funding lenders are generally local institutional investors such as pension funds and insurance companies. National savings from other countries around the world are directly providing the cheapest ammunition for the expansion of US tech giants.

Starting last year, large US cloud service providers issued a large amount of foreign currency bonds. In 2026 alone, Alphabet issued 576.5 billion JPY (3.6 billion USD) and 3.055 billion CHF (3.9 billion USD) bonds in Japan and Europe respectively; Amazon also completed 2.82 billion CHF (3.6 billion USD) bond transactions. In just two years, the foreign debt ratio of these enterprises grew from zero to 30%.

However, as the AI supply chain structure is creating many emerging non-USD assets, the asset issuance privileges enjoyed exclusively by US enterprises may not last much longer.

The importance of semiconductors from South Korea and Taiwan in the global supply chain is highlighted, and Changxin, which recently listed in China and received 500 times oversubscription, also occupies a place in the AI supply chain. Many high-quality enterprises are still excluded from the USD capital market. This is also why Changxin will list on Hyperliquid in advance; the main reason is to access global liquidity.

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And the gap between China and the US in the AI race may be smaller than we think. From DeepSeek launched last February to the amazing Kimi K3 these days, one has to admit that China is hurrying to catch up with the US, not to mention leading far ahead in the industrialization of humanoid robots. Now all the world's eyes are focused on US big tech, and the listings of OpenAI and Anthropic, but in the future when DeepSeek and Moonshot land on A-shares, perhaps it will be US investors who regret it instead.

The demand side of assets is becoming increasingly globalized, but asset ownership and issuance rights are stuck at national borders.

This is also why "brokered the unbrokered" will be more important than "banked the unbanked" in the next 15 years: the former solves how an individual accesses a stable currency system; the latter determines who can own future low-cost financing rights and own future advanced productive forces.

In 1914, Ford began implementing an eight-hour day, five-day work week. Almost everything in modern society over the past 100 years has revolved around the institutionalization of work and work ethics. Who you are often equals what job you do.

Today, one hundred years later, the fourth industrial revolution driven by AI continues to compress the marginal value of mental labor. The wage growth of the vast majority of mental workers will become increasingly difficult to catch up with asset prices and monetary expansion, especially those assets that can bear technology dividends, monetary dividends, and monopoly dividends. The right to asset allocation is no longer just a "wealth management issue" in the traditional sense, but will become a new social stratification mechanism.

The essence of finance is "selling hope" (finance is in the business of hope). May hope always remain.