BroadChain News, April 23, 18:16. Over the past two years, the crypto industry has been mired in discussions of "infrastructure surplus, application shortage." However, the whitepaper released by HashKey Chain during the Web3 Carnival points out that the infrastructure for the next generation of on-chain financial forms has yet to be built. Traditional financial institutions, bringing RWA into the fold, require compliance, privacy, and institutional-grade settlement. AI Agents, meanwhile, are evolving from conversational tools into autonomous economic entities, necessitating financial protocols for high-frequency, micro-transaction, and automated collaboration. As both the asset side and participating entities undergo a paradigm shift, HashKey Chain has chosen to position itself early, constructing a layered on-chain financial infrastructure.
The core logic of the whitepaper is layered organization, rather than single-layer expansion. The first layer is the institutional layer, addressing identity, permissions, privacy, and audit issues for RWA on-chain, integrating compliance and traceability as part of the chain itself. The second layer is the financial layer, covering RWA issuance and circulation, atomic settlement, DvP delivery, and institutional-grade DeFi adaptation, aiming to provide traditional financial institutions with an on-chain system that closely mirrors the traditional financial operating environment. The third layer is the smart economy layer, offering AI Agents capabilities for identity confirmation, permission granting, payment settlement, credit accumulation, and behavioral auditing, treating them as a new type of economic participant expected to emerge on a large scale in the future.
RWA demands far more from infrastructure than digital native assets. HashKey Chain does not provide a single-point token issuance tool, but rather a one-stop tokenization platform, balancing openness and institutional needs through a permissioned chain path. It retains Ethereum Layer2's openness and EVM compatibility while overlaying capabilities such as identity, permissions, compliance, and privacy. As part of the HashKey Group, its exchange, OTC, custody, asset management, and other businesses can be integrated, driving assets from issuance and distribution to circulation and settlement into a unified on-chain system.
AI Agents further expand the boundaries of infrastructure. HashKey Chain addresses the identity issue of agents through ZKID, builds a credit layer using a reputation mechanism, and enables agents to autonomously participate in complex financial scenarios such as yield strategies and RWA interactions based on identity and reputation. The HSP protocol provides orchestrated, verifiable, and settlement-ready rule interfaces for machine-to-machine collaboration. This framework brings humans, institutions, and agents into a single network, rather than focusing solely on a single application scenario.
HashKey Chain's differentiation lies in its underlying complete institutional capability stack. It does not start with a chain and then seek use cases; instead, it derives infrastructure needs from businesses like exchanges, OTC, and custody. Its license network and compliance layout across multiple key Asian markets give it a greater opportunity to become an on-chain hub connecting various institutional capabilities. This path requires balancing open networks, institutional rules, the smart economy, and multi-module coordination, but the whitepaper has already outlined a clear direction for evolution.