Source: HashKey

The first financial report of HashKey after going public has finally been released. From the market discussions, it seems that the key issues are not even thoroughly debated. Many interpretations currently remain superficial: either overly focused on short-term data, or simply applying traditional exchange valuation frameworks, without truly addressing the core propositions that HashKey deserves to be discussed about.

This proposition can be approached from the growth blueprint emphasized repeatedly by Xiao Feng during the press conference, which highlights the dual growth wings of a unified entity. What it reveals is not just the businesses that HashKey has currently laid out, but more importantly, what kind of business form this company is trying to develop, and whether the market has fully understood the growth logic behind this structure.

I. Why after going public, the market's pricing logic for HashKey is relatively lagging

HashKey's IPO at the end of last year was a landmark event for the digital assets landscape in Asia and even globally. The speed of its listing not only broke records at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, but the luxurious cornerstone investors behind it surprised the public. Through this listing, the market has also fully realized that mainstream capital markets are beginning to be willing to formally include compliant digital asset platforms in their observation scope.

However, even so, the market's understanding of HashKey seems to still be stuck in a relatively old impression: sufficiently compliant but with limited commercial imagination; sufficiently safe yet not strong in profit logic.

This is why many discussions still start from viewing HashKey as a local licensed exchange in Hong Kong, continuing to measure its value with the framework of traditional trading platforms: looking at trading volume, user scale, short-term revenue performance, and direct comparisons with offshore platforms.

If we apply traditional company analysis frameworks, this perspective certainly has its rationality. The problem is that what HashKey is trying to develop today is no longer just a licensed trading platform in the conventional sense.

From Xiao Feng's remarks at the financial report conference, it can be seen more clearly that what HashKey is currently presenting is not just a business structure centered around a compliant trading platform, but a digital financial platform that is evolving towards on-chain infrastructure, asset tokenization, stablecoin scenarios, AI capabilities, and regional network extensions. Further, the entire speech during the financial report outlines a new generation of digital financial infrastructure framework that the market has not yet fully recognized.

The market is still using the pre-IPO Web3 exchange logic to understand a platform that is trying to occupy a position in the new financial infrastructure amid the waves of AI and asset tokenization.

II. The true value of compliance and licensing, why it can only be maximally released during the wave of asset tokenization

In the past two years, there has been a very important external change in the industry: mainstream regulatory systems have begun to engage more deeply in the crypto industry. Against this backdrop, both global leading platforms like Binance, as well as exchanges that previously did not particularly emphasize compliance, have been forced to readjust their paths, leaning more towards responding to new regulatory realities through licensing, establishing compliance entities, differentiating between onshore and offshore business, and so on.

But if this change is only understood as stricter regulation leading everyone to pursue licenses, it still underestimates the essence of the issue.

In the pure crypto-native trading era, obtaining a license was more of a defensive action, signifying reduced policy risks and stronger survival certainty, but it did not inherently imply stronger business expansion capabilities.

What truly leads to a qualitative change in the value of licensing might not be the regulation itself, but the arrival of the asset tokenization wave.

The reason is not complicated. Over the past few cycles, crypto-native assets have grown at an extremely fast pace, creating impressive wealth effects. But in outcome, those that can truly cross cycles and settle as long-term value carriers are ultimately just a few. A large number of projects and assets were eliminated by the market after experiencing a liquidity retreat. More realistically speaking, although the crypto-native asset world is highly explosive, its long-term supply stability, sustainability, and verifiability have inherent limitations.

The corresponding logic of asset tokenization, on the other hand, is entirely different. What it anchors to is not just the on-chain native narrative and attention games, but asset types that already exist in the real world and can provide long-term continuous supply: money market instruments, bonds, fund shares, real estate income rights, accounts receivable, and even more traditional financial assets that can be standardized, titled, and circulated in the future.

In other words, asset tokenization is not about recreating a new asset world, but about reconnecting an already large, mature, and stable existing asset world to the on-chain with new technological forms.

This determines that the platform capacity requirements for the two are entirely different. In the pure crypto-native asset era, platforms primarily needed to solve issues of transaction efficiency, coin listing speed, traffic acquisition, and market activity; but in the asset tokenization era, platforms primarily need to address a whole set of collaboration issues closer to traditional finance: compliance boundaries, asset affirmation, custody arrangements, investor suitability, issuance architecture, trading rules, clearing settlement, and continuous information disclosure.

It is here that the value of licensing and compliance truly begins to be amplified. Because once the demands that the platform has to undertake are no longer just native crypto users’ transaction needs, but instead involve the complex collaborative relationships among issuers, institutional investors, custodians, market makers, and the regulatory system, then having a license and compliance framework is no longer a necessary strategic defense but becomes a prerequisite for business establishment.

This is precisely why, returning to HashKey, it is not difficult to understand why Xiao Feng emphasized RWA particularly during the financial report meeting and the entire set of on-chain infrastructure built around it.

If the market does indeed enter a stage of accelerated realization of asset tokenization in the future, then the real gap between platforms may no longer be who is better at conducting trading activities or capturing short-term traffic, but who has more capability to put assets on-chain, to trade and circulate, to arrange custody and settlement, to manage compliance, and to organize institutional services into a complete business loop.

From this perspective, the significance of RWA to HashKey is not merely presenting a new story, but more like answering a long-term positioning question for the platform: whether it is just a licensed trading platform or a digital financial infrastructure platform capable of accommodating the core needs of the asset tokenization era.

What Xiao Feng emphasized repeatedly during the financial report conference was precisely the latter. Whether it is a one-stop solution in the RWA direction, or keywords such as stablecoins, on-chain clearing, and asset digital twins, they all point to the same core logic: HashKey is attempting to transform the compliance barriers built over the long term into an organizational capability that can be commercialized, serviced, and scaled.

This point is crucial. Many platforms can also discuss RWA, can also talk about asset tokenization, and can also talk about stablecoins. But what truly determines whether these concepts can transition into business is not the ability to tell stories, but whether they can simultaneously possess the following conditions: strong institutional backing; mature compliance operational capabilities; a customer base; on-chain infrastructure; asset acceptance and liquidity organization capabilities; and the ability to link on-chain and off-chain collaborative processes.

If viewed globally, there are actually not many platforms that fit this description. Coinbase can be seen as a relatively clear reference point; whereas in the Asian context, HashKey is worth frequent discussion precisely because it is trying to form a similar capability combination.

III. What kind of future prospects arise when AI meets compliance and control?

If on-chain infrastructure and asset tokenization more correspond to the reorganization of financial elements in the next stage, then AI's significance for HashKey seems to address another question: when digital financial platforms enter a more complex, high-frequency, and intelligent era, how should the platform's organizational efficiency, risk control capabilities, and service forms be redefined under the premise of compliance and control?

This is also why Xiao Feng places AI in a rather important position during the financial report conference. On the surface, AI has become a keyword discussed in almost all industries, and trend-following narratives are not uncommon.

Because of this, the market naturally remains vigilant towards any company discussing AI, and this caution is not without merit. But if we view HashKey's AI within its overall strategic structure, what it plays may not be an additional capital story being told, but an important variable that could change the boundaries of platform capabilities.

The most crucial point here is that the AI being discussed by HashKey is not an open AI that operates outside the boundaries of regulation and risk control, but rather a capability system that is to be embedded within the licensed platform system, operating under the premise of compliance and control.

What HashKey faces is not a single business scenario. If it is to undertake compliant trading, asset tokenization, stablecoin scenarios, on-chain clearing, regional network collaboration, and institutional services in the future, then the complexity of the platform will significantly increase. In this case, the value of AI is not merely about improving efficiency slightly, but is more likely to manifest in three deeper dimensions.

First, the reconstruction of internal efficiency, but this efficiency must be built on being controllable.

Under high compliance requirements, long business chains, and many collaboration links, the penetration of AI into R&D, risk control, security, and organizational processes ultimately affects not just local efficiency, but whether the platform can maintain control and scalability as complexity increases. From this perspective, what HashKey needs is an AI system that can be deeply embedded in the licensed platform processes while adhering to compliance and risk control frameworks.

Second, the amplification of risk control and compliance capabilities, and this may be the deepest value of AI for licensed platforms.

For a licensed platform like HashKey, the true significance of AI may not be how much human labor it can replace, but whether it can form stronger systematic capabilities in monitoring, identifying, warning, and managing compliance. In other words, if AI can be embedded within the compliance and risk control framework, what it brings is not simple cost reduction, but a reinforcer of the platform's foundational capabilities.

Third, the external expansion of service boundaries, but the premise is still controllable.

As AI agents, intelligent payments, automated execution, and on-chain identity systems gradually mature, the digital asset platforms of the future may face not only how humans trade assets, but also how intelligent agents participate in value exchange, payment, and settlement.

In this sense, HashKey's current discussions around AI agent payments and other directions, although they may still be a distance away from realizing large-scale business, at least indicate that the company does not treat AI as a peripheral tool, but is attempting to understand the new role of digital financial platforms in the era of AI.

For a licensed platform like HashKey, the importance of the AI variable lies precisely in that it does not grow freely outside of the regulatory framework, but evolves in conjunction with compliance, risk control, auditing, permissions, and responsibilities, and perhaps Xiao Feng is more focused on considering: as digital financial platforms become increasingly complex, what type of AI can genuinely be integrated into the financial system and release value?

IV. Understanding the strategic ambition of a unified entity with two wings, why latent insights are significant for future financial infrastructure

If one sentence from this financial report conference deserves long-term tracking, it is likely the concept of a unified entity with two wings that Xiao Feng repeatedly mentioned. It clearly outlines the business structure that this company is attempting to develop.

The so-called unified entity refers to a global compliant trading platform. The two wings refer to on-chain infrastructure and AI.

As analyzed earlier, the unified entity is indeed the business reality of HashKey, serving as the foundational layer; while the two wings address the issues of business boundaries and capabilities. However, both the wave of asset tokenization and the AI revolution have seen various exchanges mention trends behind their business layouts, yet few have pushed these directly as their core strategy. This suggests that this might not only be an ordinary business expansion framework but a higher-level self-positioning.

What HashKey wants to achieve is perhaps not simply “to be a larger exchange,” but is attempting to answer a deeper question:

In the simultaneous trends of localizing trading, asset twinization, financial on-chaining, and service intelligentization, what should the next generation platform look like?

If this question holds, then the unified entity with two wings truly corresponds to not just the design of revenue growth paths, but a prototype platform for the next generation of digital financial infrastructure. Furthermore, the most noteworthy aspect of this strategic ambition for the market is not how many new stories it tells, but its attempt to unify several originally scattered trends: compliant trading, asset tokenization, on-chain financial capabilities, and AI-driven organizational upgrades, all under the same platform framework.

If this framework can be continuously advanced and gradually validated in the future, then HashKey’s valuation logic naturally should not remain within the dimensions of comparing traditional trading platforms but needs to be reexamined within a higher-level platform evolution logic.

From a more fundamental perspective, the most fundamental innovation of blockchain is not just single assets like Bitcoin or Ethereum, but rather the decentralized distributed ledger system behind them. The convergence of the asset tokenization wave with distributed ledgers does not result in simply copying or migrating assets onto the blockchain, but represents a reorganization of asset affirmation, trading circulation, clearing and settlement, and value transfer methods.

Because of this, the changes corresponding to this are not just an upgrade of a particular trading platform, nor simply the expansion of a few new businesses, but a financial market infrastructure upgrade surrounding asset tokenization and intelligent economies.

If this logic is followed, HashKey's attempt to advance the unified entity with two wings means not just building a few more business lines, but is trying to occupy a key platform position in this round of financial infrastructure upgrade. And this perhaps is the aspect of this strategic ambition that is most worth rereading in the market.

However, from a longer-term valuation logic perspective, the market's real misalignment often lies in using short-term bullish and bearish scales to measure the long-term growth potential of a platform that is laying out around AI and on-chain, competing for a new generation of financial infrastructure position. Perhaps, this is the most noteworthy aspect of this financial report debut.

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