HashKey Group (3887.HK) ("HashKey"), Asia's leading integrated digital assets company, officially launched the HSK Whitepaper 2.0 at the Hong Kong Web3 Festival. HashKey is committed to building "next-generation financial infrastructure," with HashKey Chain serving as the core on-chain vehicle for this strategy, aiming to create an on-chain financial infrastructure that seamlessly connects digital assets with traditional financial markets, providing institutions with a compliant, secure, and scalable on-chain execution environment.
This white paper systematically outlines HashKey Chain's roadmap for enhancing its on-chain financial infrastructure, focusing on institutional-grade permissioned blockchains, an end-to-end asset tokenization and circulation system for RWA, and on-chain identity and payment capabilities designed for the AI agent economy, further exploring the structural trend of global financial activities shifting from "off-chain" to 「on-chain」.
Institutional-grade permissioned chain: Building a on-chain execution environment that is usable and trustworthy
As asset tokenization enters a phase of scaling, financial institutions' core requirements for on-chain infrastructure are shifting from performance to compliance-friendly, privacy-preserving, and system-stable solutions.
To address this requirement, HashKey Chain is advancing its capability to build permissioned blockchains for institutional clients. The permissioned chain is designed with a three-layer architecture: Execution Layer—Data Availability Layer—Settlement Locking Layer. The Execution Layer supports high-throughput trading of hundreds of transactions per second, operates continuously around the clock, and enables instant settlement, significantly reducing settlement risk and capital lock-up. The Data Layer hosts complete trade details via a dedicated data availability layer, combined with threshold signatures and a Data Availability Committee (DAC) mechanism, to provide auditable attestations. The Settlement Layer custodyes underlying assets within Vault contracts, where all withdrawals must undergo lock-state verification before triggering, preventing risks of fictitious assets or uncollateralized withdrawals. Key business states are periodically anchored to the HashKey Chain mainchain to ensure unified and trusted finality of settlement.
This "independent execution + mainchain settlement" architecture enables institutions to conduct core business operations such as securities trading, asset tokenization, and cross-border payments in a controlled environment, while ensuring data privacy and regulatory compliance alongside on-chain interoperability.
RWA end-to-end issuance capability: from asset tokenization to on-chain circulation and settlement
Tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) is one of the most practical and foundational directions in on-chain finance today.
HashKey Chain deeply supports RWA compliance issuance standards, enabling KYC/KYB identity verification and geographic restrictions to be embedded at the token level, ensuring assets only circulate among compliant investors. At the settlement level, it achieves T+0 delivery-versus-payment (DvP) atomic settlement via smart contracts, reducing counterparty risk exposure and enabling 24/7 trading. Its white-label integration model allows institutions to retain their own branded front ends while seamlessly connecting to HashKey’s licensed backend infrastructure, leveraging a modular architecture for on-demand deployment and significantly reducing development cycles and compliance costs.
In addition, by leveraging synergies with HashKey’s trading, custody, tokenization, and on-chain businesses, HashKey has established six core capabilities covering asset access and screening, issuance architecture design, on-chain technical support, issuance and liquidity management, ongoing management, and full-cycle compliance support—completing an end-to-end闭环 for RWA from the asset side to the capital side, from project initiation to exit. HashKey Chain has currently deployed 11 tokenized products, with a total on-chain RWA asset value of approximately HK$2 billion.
HashKey Chain empowers the AI agent economy
HashKey Chain proactively aligns with the AI agent economy. The whitepaper highlights that the high-frequency, micro-transaction nature of AI agents is structurally mismatched with the traditional payment system’s T+N settlement mechanism, and existing compliance frameworks lack a verifiable identity account system for AI agents—forming a core barrier to AI’s integration into real-world commercial ecosystems.
Currently, HashKey Chain is developing a comprehensive lifecycle solution for AI Agents encompassing "Identity + Credit + Assets": leveraging the ZKID identity system to establish privacy-preserving on-chain identity accounts for AI Agents; transforming on-chain behavior into quantifiable credit ratings through innovative credit and reputation mechanisms, enabling honest AI entities to enjoy lower transaction costs and higher credit limits; and providing a high-efficiency, low-cost, robot-native compliant payment and settlement standard for global AI Agents, cross-border e-commerce, and physical enterprises via the HashKey Settlement Protocol (HSP).
Horizon Global Hackathon: Continuously Empowering Builders for On-Chain Finance
The true adoption of permissioned chains, RWA, and AI agent economies ultimately depends on what applications can run on-chain and which builders can be attracted. To this end, HashKey Chain leverages its global hackathon brand, "Horizon," planning dozens of online and offline events annually. With support from top-tier ecosystem partners such as AWS and EAG, it provides developers with full-lifecycle incubation services, including technical guidance, brand exposure, and financial support.
Li Chen, CEO of HashKey’s On-Chain Business Unit, said: “As global financial activity accelerates its migration from off-chain to on-chain, what the market truly needs is not another faster public chain, but a channel that institutions genuinely dare to use and can effectively use. What HashKey Chain has done is transform the regulatory compliance advantages built over years by the HashKey Group into an on-chain infrastructure capability that is business-ready and scalable. Our initiatives in permissioned chains, RWA one-stop issuance, and AI agent economies represent our systemic answer to what the next-generation on-chain financial infrastructure should look like.”
Read HSK White Paper 2.0