On December 17, 2025, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange bell rang, and HashKey Group, Hong Kong's first licensed digital asset trading platform, completed its listing. CryptoSalt received many messages asking us to discuss what a Hong Kong listing for a Web3 company represents, and whether it signifies a similar bright future for Web3 companies in Hong Kong as Coinbase. Before envisioning the future, we want to point out a misconception: "listing" is not the end of a successful journey. Especially for Web3 companies, listing is a significant "watershed" moment. HashKey's future challenges will no longer be limited to explaining its compliance and recognition, but will involve many other practical issues. For example, its stock price. The current economic and policy environment is not favorable. HashKey listed in this environment, initially holding above its IPO price, but quickly fell, closing at roughly the same price as, or even slightly lower than, its offering price. In the following days, the stock price mostly fluctuated below the offering price, with occasional but short-lived rebounds. The overall impression was that the market didn't rush to buy just because of its successful IPO, but rather waited to see how the company actually performed before deciding whether to buy or whether it was worth the price. Compared to Coinbase, the performance of Coinbase's stock largely depends on one thing: market activity. When the market heats up, trading volume increases, transaction fees rise, and revenue and profits are immediately reflected in the financial statements, naturally affecting the stock price. Therefore, the market tends to view Coinbase with a more "cyclical stock" or "trading platform stock" perspective. However, HashKey is not a company solely reliant on transaction fees. Due to various well-known reasons, it's more like a comprehensive platform within a regulatory framework: trading, custody, asset management, compliance services, and institutional business. Its pace is slow, and its monetization path is long, making it unlikely to generate substantial profits immediately due to a single market trend. Therefore, Coinbase's valuation logic cannot be directly applied to HashKey. However, some issues don't depend on how well a company operates, but are determined by its inherent nature. For example, as a publicly listed Web3 company, HashKey not only has publicly traded shares but also its own ecosystem token (HSK). Although HashKey states in its prospectus that HSK is merely a gas token used to pay for computation and transaction fees on HashKey, and that the token's price fluctuations are legally and structurally separate from the listed company's stock price, how can these two market pricing mechanisms—"stock price" and "token price"—achieve a sustainable balance? After all, these are two different financial market narratives, two different regulatory logics, and even vastly different investor expectations. Any company that goes public with a token ecosystem cannot avoid this issue. Today, we want to raise this question and share our perspective. In the context of traditional corporations, stock price is a relatively clear and comprehensive indicator: it compresses a company's revenue capacity, cost structure, risk exposure, governance quality, and macroeconomic expectations into a tradable price. The key here is not whether the market is rational, but that the basic requirements of the securities market for information and responsibility are certain: listed companies need continuous disclosure, verifiable operating data, a relatively stable governance structure, and clear legal obligations to investors. Therefore, the requirement for listed companies is not that their business cannot fluctuate, but that information disclosure and risk boundaries must be clear enough so that investors can make decisions within a comparable framework, that is, relatively predictable. Cryptocurrency prices are completely different. Even without discussing whether tokens possess securities attributes, from the perspective of market pricing mechanisms, the correlation between cryptocurrency prices and the "company" itself is not that high. The biggest influence on cryptocurrency prices comes from external variables, such as narratives, market expectations, liquidity structure, and most importantly—market sentiment. Therefore, stock prices and cryptocurrency prices have completely different pricing logics. Now, HashKey's IPO has brought these two forces together, and we can imagine some unavoidable contradictions: the securities market wants companies to make uncertainty transparent and controllable; the crypto market, on the other hand, is accustomed to transforming uncertainty into narratives and volatility itself. Finding a balance becomes a crucial problem that must be solved. For HashKey, the most difficult aspect is often not doing business, but achieving "continuous compliance." HashKey has achieved compliance with the "virtual asset trading platform" requirements in various jurisdictions through various sophisticated methods (see the article "Why HashKey Became the First Crypto Stock in Hong Kong?" on the Crypto Law WeChat official account). Now, as a listed company, HashKey faces compliance requirements under the Securities and Futures Ordinance and the Listing Rules. Information disclosure is the core of listed company compliance. According to relevant regulations, listed companies must ensure the fairness, timeliness, and accuracy of disclosures of material information. However, in the Web3 business scenario, the crypto market operates 24/7 with extremely rapid information dissemination, and the market has adapted to this speed. Does the addition of an ecosystem partner, the deployment of a blockchain node, or the update of a technical protocol constitute material information? Does it need to be disclosed, and how should it be disclosed? Secondly, if the listed company has not yet suspended trading or issued an announcement at the time of disclosure, will it face internal information leakage or be classified as market misconduct? Other key related issues include: First, is there a conflict of interest? Is it possible to sacrifice the interests of investors in another market to maintain the expectations of one market? For example, when deciding on profit distribution, should shareholder dividends be increased to boost the stock price, or should token buybacks be strengthened to support the price? Second, is there a risk of being misunderstood as manipulating the market? Even if there is no subjective intention, it could still have an undue impact. HashKey's employees all hold HSK; do they necessarily have access to important, yet-to-be-disclosed information due to their positions, affecting the market price of HSK? These questions cannot actually be blamed on HashKey. After all, no Web3 company designs its governance mechanism with "conflict prevention" as its primary goal. As an industry pioneer, these subtle and complex issues are problems HashKey must address. So how can HashKey achieve a balance between tokens and stocks? Crypto Law believes that the goal is not for prices to rise and fall in tandem, but rather for both prices to establish trust within their respective rules. Many people, when discussing the balance between cryptocurrencies and stocks, unconsciously fall into an intuition: ideally, they should mutually promote each other and rise in tandem, or at least not drag each other down. However, from a legal and governance perspective, a truly sustainable balance is not "uniform price movement," but "uniform rule movement": stock prices should be understood within the disclosure and governance framework of the securities market, and cryptocurrency prices should be understood within the transparency and ecosystem expectation framework of the crypto market. Companies must ensure they do not repeatedly jump between these two frameworks. In other words, companies do not need to promise what the cryptocurrency price or stock price will be; what they need to promise is a stable institutional arrangement for information disclosure and behavioral boundaries, capable of resisting short-term sentiment, liquidity shocks, and narrative fluctuations. From this perspective, the significance of HashKey's IPO for Web3 companies goes far beyond "entering the mainstream capital market." It marks the forced maturation of a new company form: one that retains Web3 characteristics while... The speed of business innovation and the way the ecosystem is organized must, within the framework of company law and securities law, achieve an auditable, disclosable, and accountable governance structure. What the industry truly needs to observe is not the performance of stock or cryptocurrency prices at a particular point in time, but whether a company can prove that, when two sets of market logics coexist, it can still manage risks, allocate responsibilities, and maintain trust with consistent systems and boundaries. If this can be achieved, the tension between cryptocurrency and stock prices will not disappear, but it will become a structure that can coexist in the long term, rather than a compliance time bomb that can explode at any moment. Therefore, we would like to say that with great power comes great responsibility. We thank HashKey for being the first to take the plunge and face these pressures head-on, and we look forward to HashKey providing answers, setting an example for more Web3 companies, and becoming a true industry leader.
JinseFinance
Weiliang
CaptainX