Proof of Progress: HashKey's Three-Pillar Bet on On-Chain Finance

The promise of blockchain finance has been largely theoretical for years. What started with the decentralization of digital currency has evolved into more sophisticated financial infrastructure.

Modern-day blockchain finance spans payments, trading, lending, asset management, and tokenization of real-world assets. However, it has yet to realize the potential of these use cases at scale in mainstream finance.

Most remain confined to crypto-native projects, niche startups, and pilots. Fragmented infrastructure, regulatory and compliance issues, institutional risk appetite, and complexity of integration have slowed adoption in the past.

Even some of the most ambitious projects remained experiments, unable to transform into mainstream financial products. That said, a palpable shift is in the works lately, with growing global regulatory clarity and tokenization of RWAs set to transform finance.

Funds, fixed income, commodities and real estate are beginning to find their way onto blockchain networks. Furthermore, institutional capital is moving deeper into digital assets, and stablecoins are becoming an increasingly important part of on-chain finance. The result is a gradual move from crypto as an alternative asset class toward blockchain as financial infrastructure.

HashKey is betting on that transition, and building for a market where the exchange is one piece of a much larger, more comprehensive on-chain financial stack. Its evolution from a crypto exchange into a broader digital-asset and on-chain financial services group, culminating in its Hong Kong listing in December 2025, provides a useful case study of where institutional crypto stands today, and where it could be headed next.

In this edition of Proof of Progress, recorded for Keeping Up With Crypto in partnership with BlockInsider, Rachel Qui, COO, HashKey, explains what going public actually changed, who is really coming on-chain, and why the honest answer to "what gets tokenized first" is that there is no low-hanging fruit.

HashKey’s public listing in Hong Kong has made its strategy more visible, and its audited financial statements provide a way to measure how far the institutionalization of crypto has actually progressed.

The numbers draw a picture more telling than the IPO headline. HashKey's institutional business is growing rapidly, while retail activity has fallen sharply.

Why it Took Seven Years to Go On-Chain

Technology advantages are one thing," said Rachel Qui, adding, "The society's adoption of the technology is another thing." The environment in China did not allow mass adoption back in 2018, when Qui's team evaluated blockchain and concluded it had clear advantages, enough to move real financial services on-chain.

Then roughly two years ago, things changed. Regulatory clarity in the US, Hong Kong, and beyond improved, institutions embraced compliance, and real funding arrived on-chain through stablecoins.

The industry data HashKey cites in its own listing documents, certified by Frost & Sullivan, puts a number on that shift: onshore, regulated trading volume is forecast to grow at a 49% compound annual rate from 2024 to 2029, against 20% for offshore venues, taking onshore trading from 16% to a projected 37% of global volume.

What Going Public Actually Changed

"What we do or what we plan to do has not changed. We just need to do a better job, and more of a job, communicating externally." Qui said while discussing HashKey’s communication strategy post IPO.

The communication gap is real. "Most people today only recognize HashKey's crypto exchange part of the business. But that's actually only one third of our overall business," she added.

The HashKey group specifies three pillars: the exchange, an on-chain business-to-business arm helping financial institutions operate on-chain, and HashKey Capital, a Web3 venture firm turned comprehensive asset manager, which the group says is now Asia's largest digital asset manager by AUM at HK$7.2 billion.

The accounts bring a clearer perspective to that framing. In FY2025, transaction facilitation still produced 72.3% of the group's HK$723.1 million revenue, so the exchange remains the commercial engine even as the group's scope widens. The fastest-growing segment, though, was asset management, up 49.8% year on year, which is consistent with the diversification that Qui describes as being underway rather than complete.

The Numbers Behind HashKey’s Institutional Bet

The most crucial element in HashKey’s strategy might not be the IPO itself, but who’s trading. Institutions, not retail, are the adoption story now, and HashKey's own FY2025 figures make that case more sharply.

Retail trading volume collapsed 79% to HK$73.4 billion amid the market slowdown. Institutional volume went the other way, growing 57% to HK$431.0 billion, while omnibus volume from partner brokerages and financial institutions grew more than sevenfold to HK$86.4 billion.

Assets on the platform rose 60.5% to HK$18.4 billion, and Hong Kong trading volume grew 72.3% to HK$530.0 billion, keeping HashKey the largest onshore platform in Asia by volume.

Taken together, these numbers provide a stronger argument for institutional adoption. Retail participation may be cyclical, but the institutional bet is structural, hence looks more definitive for HashKey.

Stablecoins Becoming the Funding Rails

One more number lands directly on COO Rachel Qui’s funding-side thesis: stablecoins accounted for 48% of the group's digital asset trading volume in FY2025. Stablecoins dominate on-chain funding today, with USDT and USDC holding more than 90% of the market, and the wave she is watching next is tokenized deposits, bank money issued natively on-chain.

On this subject, Qui also mentioned that for HashKey, the next evolution may be less about crypto-native stablecoins and more about money issued directly by financial institutions. Tokenized deposits are beginning to emerge alongside commercial stablecoins and central bank digital currencies. Moreover, HashKey chairman has referred to this landscape as three parallel models converging on programmable money.

Qui, however, adopts a more cautious approach. According to her, the pace varies by geography and institution, "and it may take longer than people anticipate. It's just because it's complicated."

What Gets Tokenized First and the Unexpected Experiment

For anyone watching the RWA market, one question remains pertinent. If every financial asset can eventually be tokenized, what is the low-hanging fruit? Qui declines the premise, explaining that tokenisation itself is not difficult for any sector. What reaches the chain is decided by non-technical forces, regulation, business need, and industry dynamics. "None of those are easy," she says of HashKey's approach. "But we believe these are the important things to do."

Three asset classes lead on HashKey's RWA platform: funds, fixed income, and commodity-based products. Here, too, there are receipts. In 2025, the group deployed 11 tokenised products on HashKey Chain, its Ethereum Layer 2 built for institutions, reaching HK$2.0 billion in total RWA value, and served as the tokenisation provider for the world's first tokenised money market ETFs, the Bosera HKD and USD funds.

In early 2026, it supported Hong Kong's first tokenised real estate project, weeks after Beijing's 6 February 2026 circular clarified a "same business, same risk, same regulation" pathway for offshore tokenisation of onshore assets.

Some of the most interesting activity is happening outside traditional financial assets. HashKey is actively observing emerging trends like Chinese robotics and artificial-intelligence companies expanding internationally that are beginning to embed stablecoin payments directly into their hardware and software.

At the same time, US Treasury and equity products are arriving on HashKey's platform looking for distribution in Asia. The common thread is not the asset. It is the need for financial infrastructure that can operate across borders and, increasingly, around the clock.

That is where HashKey believes on-chain finance has an advantage over legacy systems. The company's exchange, institutional services, tokenization platform, and asset-management business are designed to connect those use cases rather than treat them as separate markets.

AI Agents, and the Part Nobody Has Solved

HashKey's founder and chairman, Dr. Xiao Feng, has argued that tokenized assets are becoming the foundation layer of an AI agent economy, with stablecoins as its settlement layer. His formulation, as per the annual report, is compact: AI atomizes information, while Web3 atomizes value. The group has joined Google's Agent Payment Protocol (AP2) alliance to build for that future, on the logic that bank account rails cannot support the micro-payments AI agents will generate.

Rachel Qui splits the vision into what is proven and what is pending. Tokenized assets: proven and expanding. Agentic payments: the supply side is ready, including HashKey's settlement platform and purpose-built agentic modules, but the demand side, institutions working out where AI agents belong in their actual businesses, is the real work. Internally, an AI-enabled assistant already fields the questions clients bring to the issuance platform, how much to issue, at what price, work traditionally done by human advisors.

Compliance as the Long Game

HashKey holds licenses across Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Dubai and Bermuda, and Rachel's explanation for the compliance-first posture is not caution for its own sake. "Trust is a big element for either individuals or institutions to use the financial infrastructure," she says. "And trust takes time to build, but is easy to be broken." Regulation often lags business, so the firm keeps transparent, close communication with regulators and works to understand the principles underneath their rules.

The honest ledger has a cost column too. HashKey's revenue held flat in FY2025 while its net loss came to HK$1,084.3 million, with the adjusted loss widening on digital asset markdowns in a year the group itself describes as turbulent. That is the real backdrop to the quote this edition keeps returning to, and it makes the quote more interesting, not less. "The overall crypto world is in a bear market. Liquidity is not here," she says. "But this is a good time for us to build our muscles." Building through red ink is a choice with a clock on it. HashKey's balance sheet, with HK$2.8 billion in cash after the IPO and no bank borrowings, is what buys the time.

Her advice to anyone entering the space in 2026 doubles as HashKey's own thesis: don't come for speculation, find a real business problem, solve it on-chain, and hold long enough to benefit. Proof of Progress will check back on the muscle-building, next to the FY2026 accounts.

The Real Proof of Progress

HashKey's strategy can be reduced to a simple thesis: crypto's next phase will be defined less by retail speculation and more by institutional infrastructure.

The company has moved from an exchange-first model toward a broader financial infrastructure business. Institutions are becoming a larger part of its volumes. Stablecoins are moving beyond trading into funding and settlement. Tokenized funds, fixed income, commodities, and real estate are moving from pilots toward actual products.

And AI agents may eventually create an entirely new class of on-chain financial activity. But none of those trends are guaranteed. The interesting question is whether HashKey can build the infrastructure, and the trust, before the market fully arrives.

That is what makes its public listing more than a milestone. It creates a scoreboard. For the first time, HashKey's progress can be measured not just through announcements and interviews, but through its accounts.

The next test will be the FY2026 numbers. That is where the muscle-building story either starts to show results or needs a rethink.