Listing is undoubtedly a milestone victory for HashKey. However, as the prospectus lifts the veil, revealing four consecutive years of financial losses, a mere 138,000 trading platform users, and bleak data from its L2 on-chain ecosystem, it poses a sharp question to the market: On what grounds does this "unprofitable trading platform" stand?

If we measure HashKey solely using the metrics of a compliant trading platform or traditional internet companies, these metrics would inevitably lead to a pessimistic conclusion. The root of the problem lies in the market still examining HashKey—a company that is fundamentally striving to become Asian digital asset financial infrastructure—through the lens of either a "Web2 platform company" or a "Web3 trading platform."

If we change the frame of reference, all the seemingly dismal data paints a different picture. Capital markets always pay for the future, not today's financial statements. The market isn't buying HashKey's current trading volume, TVL, or loss figures; it's buying the greater possibilities of its future.

Understanding what this possibility truly entails is key to comprehending HashKey today.

I. The Valuation Misconception: Compliance and Non-compliance Are Two Worlds; Choosing Fast Money is Essentially a Business Model Choice

Today, there are typically two perspectives for understanding the crypto industry: one from traditional capital markets and another from a crypto-native viewpoint. Due to differing understandings of the industry, views on emerging companies like HashKey vary significantly.

1. The Choice Between 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, heavy on investment, and with unimpressive data.

   Many offshore trading platforms have enjoyed the retail traffic dividends and high-frequency trading fees brought by the booming crypto industry. Their growth follows a model of scale first, regulation later, with the core of their business model being speed and unbridled growth. When we compare HashKey within this framework, it naturally "doesn't look like a winner."

   Objectively speaking, however, HashKey hasn't been playing the same game from day one: The advantage of offshore exchanges lies in focusing on the present, relying on speed, arbitrage opportunities, and business flexibility afforded by regulatory gray areas. HashKey's advantage lies in facing the future, aiming to serve regulated real capital from banks, brokerages, funds, family offices, etc. Compliance and scale, especially in the early stages of Web3 development, are almost inherently conflicting.

   It's hard to imagine a regulated institution entrusting its assets to a platform without a strict licensing system, audits, or risk isolation. These safety and risk control systems aren't built by piling on speed but are constructed bit by bit through compliance, architecture, and institutional design.

2. The Value of Time: Moats Aren't Built Overnight; Strategic Accumulation Also Requires Time
   Thus, you can understand this point: For platforms, speed is the moat; for infrastructure, time is the moat instead.

   In the past few years when the industry was still in its "gray period," the former naturally appeared glorious; but as regulatory frameworks clarify, tokenized asset scales expand, and institutional entry becomes a long-term trend, the latter are the companies that truly possess long-term value capture capabilities. Therefore, when reading HashKey's prospectus, one cannot only look at revenue, traffic, and trading volume.

   Instead, look at what it has accumulated over the past few years in "non-market dimensions": It occupies the institutional gateway to licensed trading in Hong Kong; it provides the channel for future institutional asset entry; it is building the underlying framework for Asia's digital asset financial architecture; it is betting on the tokenization wave of the next decade, not the traffic dividend of the last cycle.

   All these capabilities manifest as investments in the early growth stage—R&D, compliance, manpower, and controls. But at a certain point, they will all flip into barriers.

   Ultimately, looking at the traditional capital backgrounds of HashKey's many shareholders makes it clear: 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.

   Capital markets always pay for the future, not for today's statements. A true valuation and financial understanding of HashKey must also be placed within the future financial order to be accurately deciphered.

II. The Financial Misreading: Unattractive Statements are Inevitable, but Losses Are Not Failure; They Are the Inevitable Result of Strategy

Looking solely at the financial reports, HashKey's numbers indeed don't look good. But an overlooked fact is that over the past seven years, HashKey had countless opportunities to abandon compliance, pivot offshore, and rapidly grow revenue. These opportunities were not only real but also highly tempting—lighter regulation, high leverage, high transaction frequency, immediate profits.

Yet, HashKey chose to refuse. This in itself is a strategy. What it refused wasn't a business choice, but a business path: To be a platform maximizing short-term profits or to be infrastructure capable of supporting the evolution of the financial system over the coming decades?

Therefore, when the prospectus emerged, these financial figures were not a reflection of poor operations but the inevitable outcome of a chosen strategy.

1. The Time Value of Infrastructure: Investment First, Value Later
   Looking at serious financial infrastructure globally, including industry leaders like Coinbase, their early statements were hardly optimistic, mostly showing consecutive years of losses. The value of infrastructure isn't reflected during the construction phase but after large-scale adoption. In other words, HashKey's losses aren't simply losing money; it's making the investments others will need in the future, ahead of time.

   You can afford to lose money for two or three years, but you cannot bet on a model that will be淘汰ed by future regulation; you can endure a long construction period, but you cannot miss the most certain track of future institutional assets moving on-chain.

   This is the only correct approach for an infrastructure company. HashKey chose the hardest, slowest path, but it is the only major road leading to the future of the financial system.

2. Strategic Trade-offs: Sacrificing "Speed" for "Sustainability"
   The offshore model pursues short-term profit maximization, but its future sustainability heavily relies on regulatory gray areas, carrying enormous uncertainty risks—what's feasible today might be illegal tomorrow.

   The HashKey model pursues long-term sustainability, developing sustainably within the regulatory system, building financial channels jointly with large institutions like banks, brokerages, and funds, investing in compliance, risk control, and R&D costs upfront to lay the foundation for future tokenization, RWA, and compliant stablecoins. Although sacrificing today's speed and profits, it gains a structural advantage of not being淘汰ed in the next decade.

3. The Paradox of Technology Investment: Why Does L2 "Look Bleak" Today?
   According to the prospectus, the massive R&D expenditure (over HK$556 million in 2024 alone) contrasts with the bleak technological outcomes—even disregarding the exchange entity being constrained by regulation, on-chain activity isn't high either. This seems contradictory.

   However, speaking solely of Ethereum L2s, there are currently no fewer than hundreds of similar competitors on the market, most of which are effectively ghost chains. Therefore, the author does not believe HashKey is investing technological resources into a completely oversupplied赛道. It must be building based on its own strengths, engaging in asymmetric competition.

   From HashKey Chain's external communications, its design goal from the outset was not to support retail's high-frequency DeFi speculation but to serve institutional RWA and compliant stablecoin issuance. Unfortunately, the RWA market is still in its early experimental phase and the stage of navigating compliance processes; it has not yet seen large-scale asset onboarding and a trading explosion. The low chain activity reflects not a technical defect of the product itself, but that its targeted institutional market has not yet entered a period of traffic explosion.

III. The Reversal of the Business Model: 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 for survival. It is betting on a longer-cycle, higher-certainty, larger-scale trend: the tokenization of traditional financial assets and institutional asset entry. This is a once-in-20-years structural opportunity in global finance. Consequently, a fundamental shift in the business model is inevitable.

1. Revenue Model: From Traffic to Services
   HashKey's business model is currently undergoing a fundamental reversal, shifting from the traditional "traffic monetization" model to an "infrastructure services" model. In the prospectus, HashKey's emphasis on disclosing its CaaS service is a telling signal of this model shift. It is not competing for retail users but building on-chain infrastructure serving institutions, brokerages, banks, stablecoin issuers, and wealth management firms. HashKey's future growth curve depends more on what percentage of global Assets Under Management (AUM) chooses to tokenize and trade through Hong Kong's compliant通道. Its revenue will come from托管, asset issuance, etc., with far superior quality and stability compared to retail trading fees.

2. Strategic Balance: Balancing Offshore and Onshore
   However, perhaps because HashKey深知 the infrastructure construction cycle is too long and arduous, and purely compliant revenue growth速度 is难以 to support the massive投入 in the short term, strategic trade-offs must be made:

   The core strategy remains committed to solidifying Hong Kong's compliance capabilities and building the institutional gateway. Simultaneously, for short-term business balance, it has been pushing its offshore exchange in the past two years. The strategic positioning of this move is to drive retail user growth, supplement short-term revenue, and undertake the task of international market expansion.

   While adhering unwaveringly to the long-term strategy, tactically supplementing with an offshore exchange reflects both the pressure of continued strategic investment and realistic pragmatic considerations.

   These choices are not without cost: delayed profit realization and the market's cost of understanding the "dual-line strategy" are practical constraints HashKey must bear.

IV. Conclusion

It's not strange for the market to scrutinize a prospective listed company with a magnifying glass, and questioning the finances is entirely reasonable. However, the real question is: What kind of company should HashKey be viewed as?

Its losses are not a problem with its business model but the price of its strategic path. The story of financial infrastructure has never been about speed; it's about time.

Capital markets always pay for the future. HashKey's prospectus writes not of today's financial condition but of its strategic coordinates for the next decade. If the story of the past belonged to trading platforms and traffic, then the story of the future will belong to compliant gateways, institutional infrastructure, and a tokenized financial system. And when that era truly arrives, all the seemingly "unattractive" numbers today will become the necessary context for understanding HashKey.

To understand HashKey, one needs to look beyond today and towards the future. Because its true value has never been in the present, but on the next page of the era. However, the market never listens to stories alone; it will ultimately verify everything with data. The coming years are the period when HashKey must deliver answers.