HashKey On-Chain truly aims to build a foundational infrastructure system that allows real assets, institutional capital, and business activities to continuously operate in the on-chain world.

Written by: Alvin Liu

The greatest inspiration from the Age of Discovery for the later Industrial Revolution lies in: what astonished the world may have been the opening of new trade routes; but what truly changed the world was not the trade routes themselves, but the ports, trade, insurance, settlement, and commercial networks that gradually formed around the navigation.

Today, a similar story is unfolding between blockchain and the traditional world.

1. The Launch of HashKey's Three Major Platforms: A New Understanding of What RWA Has Changed

As the largest web3 conference in Asia, WebX has always been a stage for various public chain exchanges to showcase new products. During this conference, HashKey On-Chain launched HIP, HTP, and HSP, three major platforms all at once.

HashKey's on-chain actions have long been viewed as an important window for observing changes in the industry. As a key player in the compliant digital asset market in the Asia-Pacific region, how HashKey understands on-chain finance reflects, to some extent, how compliant institutions gauge the next phase of the industry.

In particular, HashKey has long maintained close cooperation with banks, asset management institutions, trading platforms, payment agencies, and physical enterprises. Therefore, compared to general public chains, its understanding of on-chain finance is naturally closer to the real financial system: how assets can compliantly enter, how institutions can participate, how liquidity is formed, and how payment and settlement genuinely integrate into corporate operations.

From this perspective, looking at HIP, HTP, and HSP, the significance of the three platforms goes beyond merely integrating and upgrading a few product capabilities. HIP focuses on the on-chain issuance of real-world assets, HTP undertakes secondary trading and liquidity for tokenized assets, while HSP further connects payment and settlement. Together they cover asset entry, asset circulation, and fund settlement, forming a relatively complete on-chain finance link.

This systematic layout actually responds to a more fundamental question: what kind of infrastructure is necessary for real assets to enter on-chain amid the ongoing RWA wave? 

The market has a simple cognitive misunderstanding of RWA, which is often simply understood as turning real assets into tokens.

But the real change it brings is not merely the expansion of the on-chain asset scale, but a shift in the construction logic of blockchain infrastructure. In the era of crypto nativism, the infrastructure mainly revolved around the chain itself. Because assets inherently exist on-chain, issuance, trading, and settlement could generally be completed within the same technical system. What the market focused on was primarily performance, cost, developers, and liquidity.

Real assets are completely different. A bond, a trade receivable, or a shipping electronic bill must first resolve issues of asset ownership, legal effectiveness, and information disclosure before entering the chain. After the asset is on the chain, it still needs to address trading venues, price discovery, liquidity, payment settlement, and ongoing management.

Therefore, RWA is primarily a legal and financial engineering issue, followed by a technical engineering problem.

In this sense, the launch of the three major platforms, HIP, HTP, and HSP, reflects that HashKey On-Chain has formed a clearer judgment through ongoing practice: RWA faces a set of interrelated systemic problems that are hard for any single product to solve independently. The RWA infrastructure must transition from single-point product construction to platformization and systematization, reorganizing the complete business processes of asset entry, market circulation, and fund settlement while allowing legal, compliance, technical, and financial capabilities to interconnect within the same system.

This reflects not a simple product expansion, but a reordering of HashKey On-Chain's prioritization of infrastructure development: shifting from a past focus on underlying networks to the point of whether real financial operations can be completed effectively. Based on past industry development experiences, this path is destined to be slower, heavier, and harder to generate short-term heat. But from the business logic of real finance, it is nearly the unavoidable route for RWA scaling.

2. From Permissioned Chains to CeDeFi: The Breakthroughs of HashKey On-Chain Are Always at the Asset and Fund Ends

We still remember at this year's Hong Kong Web3 conference, HashKey Chain introduced the concept of permissioned chains in its new white paper. At that time, the market did not fully understand: in the context where public chains are highly mature, why do we still need permissioned chains? 

Only when traditional financial institutions such as JPMorgan, HSBC, and SWIFT began to explore their own blockchain networks did the significance of permissioned chains gradually become clear. It is not a regression of public chains or the re-establishment of a closed financial system; rather, it is an infrastructure issue that traditional institutions almost cannot avoid when entering the on-chain world. Financial institutions need to clarify participants' identities, asset responsibilities, data permissions, and risk boundaries. Questions such as who issues an asset, who custodies it, who can hold and trade it, and who bears responsibility in case of anomalies are challenging to entirely delegate to an open network that does not require permission.

Therefore, the first thing that permissioned chains solve is not efficiency but issues of trust and responsibility. They allow banks, asset management institutions, and large enterprises to attempt asset issuance, trading, and settlement in an environment where identities are recognizable, permissions are manageable, and risks are isolated.

However, permissioned chains are not the endpoint either. If assets remain permanently in a closed network, although they can complete rights confirmation, registration, and inter-institutional circulation, it will be difficult to obtain broader funding, trading depth, and price discovery. Real assets may achieve digitization but might not necessarily gain true liquidity.

This is also the reason why HashKey On-Chain is moving from permissioned chains to CeDeFi. By introducing mature DeFi protocols like Morpho and planning further integration with the HashKey Exchange system, it aims to solve how assets and funds can genuinely flow after institutions enter.

From the development of HashKey On-Chain over the past few years, what it has been truly breaking through has not simply been the underlying technology but the asset end and the fund end.

Because permissioned chains can safely bring institutions and assets in, CeDeFi is responsible for allowing them to enter a larger liquidity network. Hence, the overall path is also gradually becoming clearer: one end supplements asset supply while the other connects funding sources.

On the asset end, it is necessary to continuously bring real assets such as bonds, funds, precious metals, and trade assets on-chain. The role of HIP is to gradually platform the selection of assets, structural design, legal compliance, and on-chain issuance to provide a relatively stable asset supply for on-chain finance.

On the fund end, it is essential to connect licensed trading platforms, professional investors, institutional funds, and DeFi protocols. HTP addresses the secondary trading and liquidity issues of tokenized assets, while licensed platforms like HashKey Exchange provide compliant access and institutional networks; mature DeFi protocols further offer round-the-clock trading, lending, and asset portfolio capabilities.

This is also the more realistic meaning of CeDeFi. It does not seek a vague middle state between centralized finance and decentralized finance but allows two systems to form clearer divisions of labor: licensed institutions solve issues related to identity, compliance, custody, and fiat entry, while DeFi addresses trading efficiency, asset composition, and open liquidity.

One end brings real assets in while the other connects funding and liquidity.

Only if both the asset end and the fund end are established can RWA potentially evolve from a series of scattered issuance projects into a continuously operating financial market. Otherwise, having only assets without funds means tokenization ultimately becomes merely a change in asset registration methods; having only funds without real assets would lead on-chain finance back to the internal circulation of crypto assets.

From this perspective, the positioning of HSK Chain as a public chain has also changed.

It is no longer just a technical network that supports smart contracts and transactions but a bridge connecting permissioned environments with open markets, traditional institutions with DeFi liquidity. Internally, it connects licenses, bank partnerships, institutional clients, and compliance services that HashKey has accumulated; externally, it connects developers, DeFi protocols, and global on-chain funds.

In other words, based on HSK Chain, what HashKey On-Chain is truly attempting to solve is how to bring real assets into a more open financial network without sacrificing compliance and risk boundaries.

Permissioned chains establish trust boundaries, while CeDeFi opens liquidity boundaries. The two correspond to the two issues that must be resolved in the scaling process of on-chain finance: why institutions dare to come in, and why assets can flow once they enter.

3. Towards the Future: Entering the Deep Waters of On-Chain Financial Infrastructure

During WebX, HashKey's entire On-Chain business cluster showcased not merely a product launch but a clearer strategic shift: moving away from focusing on public chains and individual on-chain services toward constructing a complete on-chain financial infrastructure centered around assets, funds, payments, and future transaction entities.

This also implies that HashKey On-Chain is entering the true deep waters. In the era of crypto nativism, the success of infrastructure is relatively easy to quantify. Whether transaction speeds are faster, gas costs lower, or how many users and assets exist in the ecosystem can usually define the most intuitive competitive power of a public chain.

However, when the target service changes to financial institutions, trading enterprises, payment companies, and cross-border businesses, the issues become much more complex. This is also why HashKey's on-chain financial infrastructure will ultimately have to progress toward platformization and systematization while concurrently launching a standardized seven-step process for on-chain entry.

In other words, what HashKey is doing now is gradually transforming previously highly customized, multi-party coordinated business models into reusable products and processes; at the same time, making issuance, trading, payment, and settlement interconnected.

Moreover, from the perspective of the entire HashKey Group, the licenses, bank collaborations, institutional clients, and regional channels accumulated over the long term have opportunities to further integrate into HSK Chain and the entire On-Chain ecosystem under the promotion of the CeDeFi model.

On this basis, future AI Agents may further expand the subject boundaries of on-chain finance. If RWA brings new assets, then AI Agents bring new transaction and payment subjects. From this perspective, the significance of HSP is not just to serve current stablecoin collections. The order processing, payment status synchronization, account reconciliation, and settlement capabilities being built today may also become foundational modules for AI Agents and A2A payments in the future.

Of course, this is still a rather early direction, and this path is destined not to be easy. Because what it needs to solve has never been just a technical issue. How to confirm asset rights, how payments translate into business operations, and how cross-border businesses adapt to different market regulations are all issues that cannot be overlooked.

What truly changed the world during the Age of Discovery was not merely the discovery of new continents. The new continents were just the starting point; what truly shaped later commercial order were the ports, trade routes, trade systems, insurance, and settlement networks established bit by bit.

From this perspective, what HashKey On-Chain truly wants to build is a system that allows real assets, institutional capital, and business activities to continuously enter and operate within the on-chain world.

Public chains opened up new spaces, but only when issuance, liquidity, payments, settlements, and compliance networks gradually mature can this space genuinely become a part of the financial market. New trade routes determine whether people can arrive, while infrastructure determines whether this new world can truly prosper.