The Disappearing Buy Button

The financial borders between countries look complex, but when it comes down to individual accounts, it is often just a button.

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

When capital begins to show a tendency to detach from state control, the tightening of regulations最先 restricts the space for individual choice and asset allocation.

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

For many Chinese families, this channel承担s not just investment needs. After wage growth slowed and the value of Chinese real estate shrunk significantly, allocating global quality enterprises might be one of the few paths still available to change Chinese family wealth over the next twenty years. Now, this path is also narrowing.

China's Capital Great Wall

The "Implementation Plan for Comprehensive Rectification of Illegal Cross-Border Securities, Futures, and Fund Operating Activities" jointly issued by the CSRC and eight other departments is very clear: within two years, all illegal cross-border investment activities will be completely shut down. Effective immediately, opening any new accounts and capital inflows are prohibited. Only existing funds are allowed to be fully transferred out within two years. In addition to financial services, all supporting facilities and services surrounding cross-border investment, including information exposure on domestic networks, are also completely prohibited.

At the same time, Futu and Tiger Brokers were fined 1.85 billion (270 million USD) and 410 million (60.7 million USD) yuan respectively. Their stock prices plummeted by 45% and 30% in pre-market trading at one point, declaring that the era of mainland Chinese users freely trading US stocks on the regulatory edge has officially come to an end.

In fact, this is not a single sudden event. China has been gradually tightening previously legal RMB outbound investment channels in recent years, starting from knocking on the door to rectifying brokerages:

• 2021/11: CSRC interviewed senior executives of Futu (FUTU) and Tiger Brokers (TIGR)
• 2022/12: Both companies were defined 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 to counter 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:

• Complete ban on cryptocurrency: Forced Chinese miners holding advanced data center designs and energy integration capabilities to go overseas; forced the world's largest crypto digital currency to go overseas
• Interference in ByteDance's TikTok sale case in the US: Forced ByteDance to cut off its highest quality assets, indefinitely postponing the parent company's listing plan
• Vetoed Manus acquisition: Forced Manus to seek support from local Chinese capital parties, seeking the possibility of listing on HK stocks

Tough regulation is not only about restricting capital flows, 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 bottom up.

In the previous round of globalization, China could still stand out relying on manufacturing supply chains; 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 more than ten years of technical accumulation but also背靠 the vast US capital market. Their ability to finance and leverage financial leverage may differ from Chinese enterprises by not just 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, combined with a series of support measures for HK stocks and the A-share STAR Market, strategically encourage enterprises with core technologies and data sensitivity to prioritize listing on A-shares or Hong Kong stocks rather than issuing ADRs in the US. This brings about Chinese entrepreneurs complying with Beijing's choice of "East rises, West falls" capital operations: In 2025, the total IPO amount in HK stocks was about 285 billion HKD (36 billion USD), ranking first globally again since 2019, far exceeding the second place Nasdaq's 27.5 billion USD. The proportion of enterprises listed on both A-shares and HK stocks is also continuing to rise, accounting for nearly 60% by the first half of this year.

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It is visible that the HKEX is being built into a center for Chinese-funded enterprises to absorb global liquidity, while firmly keeping governance rights in Chinese hands.

Therefore, this comprehensive cleanup of US stock brokerages is not just about preventing local capital from continuously providing valuation premiums to the US capital market. In the context that China has already missed the AI industry opportunity, the strategic significance represented by this step may far surpass all previous capital control measures.

Anxious Chinese Retail Investors

According to the MSCI World Index factsheet at the end of June 2026, the top ten components combined account for 25.74% of the index weight, almost all of which are US tech and AI-related companies. These companies control the ownership of future cash flows such as AI computing power, cloud platforms, chips, ad networks, operating systems, consumer entry points, 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 USD 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,研发, 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 seize this most obvious era beta.

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The industry distribution of China's A-shares is a completely different picture. 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 the end of 2025 to the beginning of 2026, the weight of the Information Technology sector achieved a historic overtaking for the first time, officially surpassing the Financials sector to become the largest industry by weight in A-shares.

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In the past twenty years, China's economic growth engine 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. But in recent years, the macro structure has undergone fundamental changes, well reflecting the resonance of China's unique national strategic will and structural liquidity guidance:

1. Turnaround of the credit cycle: With controls on 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 technological innovation re-lending) 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 re-pricing for "autonomous controllability" and "tech self-reliance and self-strengthening". Companies in fields such as computing infrastructure, semiconductor equipment, and high-end materials have received 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 ChatGPT was released in 2022, China, as the world's second-largest economy, has ranked last among the top five economies in stock market gains. 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 cross-border investment demand within China is not just so-called "worshiping foreign things". With Chinese local tech enterprises performing平平, real estate shrinking sharply, the sense of relative deprivation in wealth has pushed retail investor anxiety to the peak. ETFs tracking overseas markets even appeared with 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 boosting foreign enterprises,转而 supporting 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, which country quality productive assets come from does not matter, they only care about whether they can buy these targets.

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

Brokering the unbrokered

In the past 15 years, the main narrative axis of crypto was banked the unbanked: allowing people without bank accounts to access payment, savings, lending, and advanced currency systems. This narrative is still 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 exceed 3.4 billion USD; RWA perpetual contract trading on trade.xyz exceeded 6 billion USD in a single day.

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Even if this volume still has a very large gap compared to 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 collateralized, lent, and combined into new asset structures like crypto 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 blocked outside the door, tomorrow it might be Latin American users without US brokerage accounts, Asian users without qualified investor qualifications, Middle East users restricted by their own country's capital controls, or just a young person who does not want their local financial system to decide asset boundaries. So the next big opportunity for crypto is not necessarily making a faster wallet or a cheaper exchange, but making a new asset entry point, repackaging, pricing, and distributing global productive assets.

Capital Flows 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 world.

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

Starting from last year, US large cloud service providers issued a large number of foreign currency bonds. In 2026 alone, Alphabet issued 576.5 billion yen (36 billion USD) in Japan and 3.055 billion Swiss francs (3.9 billion USD) in Europe respectively; Amazon also completed 2.82 billion Swiss francs (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 privilege exclusively enjoyed by US enterprises may not be maintainable for much longer.

The importance of Korean and Taiwanese semiconductors in the global supply chain is highlighted, and China's recently listed Changxin, which received 500x oversubscription, also occupies a place in the AI supply chain. Many quality enterprises are still excluded from the USD capital market. This is also why Changxin would list on Hyperliquid in advance, the main reason being 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 in February last year to the amazing Kimi K3 these past few days, one has to admit China is catching up with the US quickly, not to mention leading far ahead in the industrialization of humanoid robots. Now all the world's attention is 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 should wring their hands in regret.

The demand side of assets is becoming increasingly globalized, but asset ownership and issuance rights are stuck by 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 possess 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.

One hundred years later, the AI-driven Fourth Industrial Revolution continues to compress the marginal value of brain labor. Wage growth for the vast majority of brain workers will become increasingly difficult to catch up with asset prices and monetary expansion, especially those assets that can carry technology dividends, monetary dividends, and monopoly dividends. Asset allocation rights are no longer just a traditional "wealth management problem", 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.