Original Author: Luccy
The listing is undoubtedly a milestone victory for HashKey. However, when the prospectus unveils its contents, the continuous financial losses over four years, a mere 138,000 users on its trading platform, and the dismal data regarding its L2 chain ecosystem raise a sharp question in the market: how can this "unprofitable trading platform" justify its existence?
If we merely measure HashKey using the metrics of a compliant trading platform or traditional internet standards, these metrics will inevitably lead to a pessimistic conclusion. The root of the problem lies in the fact that the market is still viewing a company that is essentially trying to become the digital asset financial infrastructure of Asia through the lens of "Web2 platform companies" or "Web3 trading platforms."
If we change the coordinate system, all the seemingly poor data will present a different picture. The capital market is always paying for the future, not today's financial statements. The market is not buying HashKey's current trading volume, TVL, or loss figures, but rather the greater possibilities that lie ahead.
Understanding what this possibility is becomes the key to understanding HashKey today.
1. Misconception of Valuation: Compliance and Non-compliance are Two Different Worlds; the Choice of Quick Money is Essentially a Business Model Decision
Today, when we try to understand the crypto industry, there are typically two perspectives: one from traditional capital markets and the other from a crypto-native viewpoint. Due to differing understandings of the industry, opinions on emerging companies like HashKey vary significantly.
1. Choice of Speed and System: Platform vs. Infrastructure
From a crypto-native perspective, HashKey is a medium-sized trading platform that is small in scale, slow in pace, heavily invested, and has unimpressive data.
In contrast, many offshore trading platforms have enjoyed the retail traffic dividends and high-frequency trading fees brought about by the booming crypto industry. Their growth follows a model of scaling first and regulating later, with the core of their business model being speed and wild growth. When we compare HashKey within this coordinate system, it certainly "does not look like a winner."
However, objectively speaking, it has never been playing the same game from day one: the advantage of offshore exchanges is their focus on the present, relying on speed, arbitrage opportunities, and the business flexibility brought by regulatory gray areas. HashKey's advantage is its forward-looking approach, aiming to serve regulated real funds such as banks, brokerages, funds, and family offices, where compliance and scale are almost mutually exclusive in the early stages of Web3 development.
It is hard to imagine a regulated institution entrusting assets to a platform without a strict licensing system, audits, or risk isolation. These safety and risk control systems are built not through speed but through compliance, architecture, and systematic design, constructed bit by bit.
2. The Value of Time: A Moat is Not Built Overnight; Strategic Accumulation Also Requires Time
Thus, you can understand this point: for platforms, speed is a moat; for infrastructure, time is the moat.
In the past few years, when the industry was still in a "gray period," the former naturally appeared to be thriving; but as regulatory frameworks become clearer, the scale of tokenized assets expands, and institutional entry becomes a long-term trend, the latter represents the type of company that truly possesses long-term value capture capabilities. Therefore, when looking at HashKey's prospectus, one should not only focus on revenue, traffic, and trading volume,
but also consider what it has accumulated in "non-market dimensions" over the past few years: it occupies the institutional entry point for licensed trading in Hong Kong; it serves as the channel for future institutional asset entry; it builds the underlying financial architecture for digital assets in Asia; it bets on the wave of tokenization over the next decade, rather than the previous round of traffic dividends.
These capabilities initially manifest as investments—R&D, compliance, human resources, and control. But at some point, they will all reverse into barriers.
Ultimately, we will understand from the traditional capital backgrounds of many HashKey shareholders: they are not just looking at the current financial statements but at the company's governance capabilities, sustainable business model, and its inevitability in the future financial system.
The capital market always pays for the future, not for today's statements. The true valuation and financial understanding of HashKey must also be placed within the context of the future financial order to be genuinely comprehended.
2. Misinterpretation of Finances: Unattractive Financial Statements are Inevitable, but Losses are Not Failures; They are the Inevitable Result of Strategy
If we only look at the financial reports, HashKey's numbers indeed do not look good. However, one overlooked fact is that over the past seven years, HashKey has had countless opportunities to abandon compliance, turn to offshore operations, and rapidly increase revenue. These opportunities not only exist but are also highly tempting—light regulation, high leverage, high trading frequency, and instant profits.
However, HashKey chose to refuse. This refusal is itself a strategy. It is not rejecting a business choice but a business path: whether to become a platform that maximizes short-term profits or to build an infrastructure that can support changes in the financial system for decades to come.
Therefore, when the prospectus comes out, these financial data do not reflect poor management but are the inevitable result of strategic choices.
1. The Time Value of Infrastructure: Investment Comes First, Value Comes Later
Looking at serious financial infrastructures globally, including industry leaders like Coinbase, their early financial reports are hardly optimistic, often showing consecutive years of losses. The value of infrastructure does not manifest during the construction phase but rather after it has been widely used. In other words, HashKey's losses are not simply about losing money; they are about making early investments in what others will need in the future.
You can incur losses for two or three years, but you cannot stake your future on a model that will be eliminated by regulation; you can endure a long construction period, but you cannot miss the most certain track of institutional assets being put on-chain in the future.
This is the only correct approach for infrastructure companies. HashKey has chosen the hardest and slowest path, but it is the only road that leads to the future of the financial system.
2. Strategic Trade-offs: Sacrificing "Speed" for "Sustainability"
The offshore model pursues maximizing short-term profits, but its future sustainability heavily relies on regulatory gray areas, which carry significant uncertainty risks; what is feasible today may not be legal tomorrow.
HashKey's model pursues long-term sustainability, developing within the regulatory framework, co-building financial channels with large institutions such as banks, brokerages, and funds, and making early investments in compliance, risk control, and R&D, laying the groundwork for future tokenization, RWA, and compliant stablecoins. Although it sacrifices today's speed and profits, it gains a structural advantage that will not be eliminated in the next decade.
3. The Paradox of Technological Investment: Why Does L2 "Look Dismal" Today?
According to the prospectus, the enormous R&D expenditure (over HKD 556 million in 2024 alone) and the dismal technological outcomes, aside from the regulatory constraints on the exchange itself, show that on-chain activity is also not high. This seems contradictory.
However, if we only consider Ethereum L2, there are currently hundreds of similar competitors in the market, most of which are ghost chains. Therefore, I do not believe HashKey is investing technological resources in a completely oversupplied field. It must be based on its own advantages, engaging in asymmetric competition.
From HashKey Chain's external promotion, it can be seen that its design goal from the beginning was not to support high-frequency DeFi speculation by retail investors but to serve institutional RWA and compliant stablecoin issuance. Unfortunately, the RWA market is still in the early experimental and compliance process stage, and has yet to see a large-scale on-chain asset and trading explosion. The low activity of the chain does not reflect a technical flaw in the product itself but rather indicates that the institutional market it targets has not yet entered a traffic explosion phase.
3. The Reversal of Business Models: Tokenization and Institutional Asset Entry Will Rewrite HashKey's Growth Curve
It is evident that the current HashKey is not a trading platform that relies on retail trading fees. It is betting on a longer cycle, higher certainty, and a much larger trend: the tokenization of traditional financial assets and the entry of institutional assets. This is a structural opportunity that occurs once in 20 years in global finance. Thus, there will inevitably be a fundamental shift in its business model.
1. Revenue Model: From Traffic to Service
HashKey's business model is currently undergoing a fundamental reversal, shifting from the traditional "traffic monetization" model to an "infrastructure service" model. In the prospectus, HashKey emphasizes its CaaS service, which is a hallmark of this model shift. It is not competing for retail users but is building on-chain infrastructure to serve institutions, brokerages, banks, stablecoin issuers, and wealth management institutions. HashKey's future growth curve will depend more on the proportion of global asset management scale (AUM) that chooses to tokenize and trade through Hong Kong's compliant channels. Its revenue will come from custody, asset issuance, etc., with revenue quality and stability far exceeding retail trading fees.
2. Strategic Balance: Balancing Offshore and Onshore
However, perhaps HashKey is well aware that the cycle of infrastructure construction is too long and arduous, and pure compliance revenue growth cannot support the massive investments in the short term. Therefore, strategic trade-offs must be made:
The core strategy remains focused on solidifying Hong Kong's compliance capabilities and creating institutional entry points. At the same time, in terms of short-term business balance, it has ramped up efforts in offshore exchanges over the past two years. The strategic positioning of this move is to accommodate retail user growth, compensate for short-term revenue, and undertake the responsibility of expanding into international markets.
While maintaining a steadfast long-term strategy, tactically supplementing through offshore exchanges addresses both the pressure of continuous strategic investment and practical considerations.
These choices do not come without costs: delayed profit realization and the market's understanding of the "dual-line strategy" are both real constraints that HashKey must bear.
4. Conclusion
It is not surprising that the market scrutinizes a company planning to go public with a magnifying glass, and questioning its finances is entirely reasonable. However, the real question is: how should HashKey be viewed?
Its losses are not a problem with the business model but rather the cost of its strategic route. The story of financial infrastructure has never been about speed but about time.
The capital market always pays for the future. What is written in HashKey's prospectus is not today's financial status but the strategic coordinates for the next decade. If the past story belonged to trading platforms and traffic, the future story will belong to compliant entry points, institutional infrastructure, and a tokenized financial system. When this era truly arrives, all the seemingly "ugly" numbers today will become the necessary background for understanding HashKey.
To understand HashKey, one must look beyond today and toward the future. Because its true value has never been in the present but on the next page of the era, and the market will never only listen to stories; it will ultimately verify everything with data. The next few years will be the period in which HashKey must deliver answers.
This article is from a submission and does not represent the views of BlockBeats.
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