In January 2025, Coinbase and EY-Parthenon surveyed 352 institutional decision makers, and the results showed that 83% of respondents planned to expand their cryptocurrency allocation this year, and 59% of respondents planned to allocate more than 5% of their assets under management to Crypto assets in 2025.
A very clear signal has been sent:
With the increasing clarity of the regulatory environment and the emergence of a wider range of use cases, institutional confidence in crypto assets is growing. With unprecedented institutional participation, 2025 will be an important turning point for the outbreak of on-chain finance.
As an important infrastructure for on-chain finance, how can blockchain better support the development of on-chain finance and carry more funds, users and complex financial gameplay?
This is an arena of hard power competition, and the encryption leaders are ready to go.
Among them, the promotion of the US government's crypto-friendly policies and the president's active crypto actions have brought heat and traffic, and US concept crypto companies have frequently been at the forefront of public opinion. As the most representative crypto company in the United States, Coinbase is not only a guest of honor at the White House Digital Asset Summit, but its high-performance L2 Base is rapidly promoting the prosperity and development of finance on the ecological chain through the compliant stablecoin USDC path.
In the Eastern world, which also focuses on financial innovation, a revolutionary force around the tokenization of financial products has begun to brew:
As Asia's leading digital asset financial services group, HashKey's financial and RWA preferred public chain HashKey Chain mainnet has officially been launched, aiming to build a secure, compliant and efficient blockchain ecosystem, and promote the deep integration of DeFi and traditional finance through the tokenization of financial products.
Under this general trend, a battle for the right to speak on blockchain finance has already begun. In this undecided competition, who will come out on top?
This report aims to explore the opportunities for the explosion of on-chain finance in 2025, how blockchain platforms should take on value, and the key factors in becoming an important infrastructure for on-chain finance.
From off-chain to on-chain: the inevitable choice for financial development
The history of human financial development can be said to be a microcosm of the history of human civilization progress.
From the birth of the concept of interest in ancient Babylon in 2400 BC, which was located in the civilization of the Mesopotamian Valley, to the birth of the prototype of modern banking in Italy, which was the center of the Renaissance in the Middle Ages, to the issuance of the world's first stock by the Netherlands, the coachman of the sea during the Age of Discovery in the 17th century, to the reconstruction of the world order after World War II, Wall Street, where capital operations never stop under the gold standard, has become a barometer of world finance.
We can find that finance has permeated our economic life since the beginning of human civilization;
Every qualitative breakthrough in finance occurs when human society’s productivity undergoes a major transformation;
And every leap forward in the development of the financial industry pursues more efficient capital flow and resource allocation.
Now, in the context of intensified global geopolitical conflicts, the impact of a multipolar monetary system on the dollar's hegemony, and the rise of the digital economy, and faced with the deep-rooted problems of the current financial system, such as increasing inequality, declining capital gains, and a lack of efficiency, we are once again at an important juncture in witnessing another leap forward in human finance.
On-Chain Finance, which is built on blockchain technology, is becoming a backbone force in promoting major changes in finance with its huge advantages in eliminating the chronic problems of traditional finance.
Decentralization is a prominent feature of on-chain finance. It not only eliminates dependence on a single institution and lays a good foundation for inclusive finance, but the distributed ledger of the blockchain makes all transaction records open, transparent and tamper-proof, greatly improving the transparency of the financial system.
The significant improvement in capital efficiency is the core advantage of on-chain finance. While traditional finance is restricted by frameworks such as sovereign states, monetary systems, and geographical environments, resulting in low transaction efficiency and high friction, on-chain finance provides an effective solution for the efficient flow of capital on a global scale. At the same time, on-chain finance provides 7 x 24-hour service through smart contracts and automated processes, bringing a financial experience of anytime, anywhere, efficient, and low-cost transactions.
More importantly, another major role of finance is to leverage greater returns. On-chain finance can provide capital gains that are several times higher than traditional finance by optimizing resource allocation, reducing transaction costs, shortening investment cycles, etc., thereby bringing higher profit potential. Whether for traditional financial institutions or investment users, on-chain finance is more attractive.
As blockchain technology continues to improve in performance, on-chain finance is expected to become the core engine of capital flow and resource allocation, driving human society towards a more efficient, fairer, and more sustainable financial future. As 2025 kicks off, on-chain finance is also facing an important opportunity to explode under the general trend of clear supervision and eagerness of institutions to try.
2025: The Eve of the Full Explosion of On-chain Finance
As early as 2024, the implementation of multiple milestones has laid a good foundation for the development of on-chain finance.
We witnessed the passage of the Bitcoin ETF in January 2024 , a historic moment that eliminated the complexity and technical barriers to directly purchasing, storing and managing Bitcoin, opening the door to mainstream participation and attracting large amounts of institutional funds:
According to Coinglass data, the current total net asset value of Bitcoin spot ETFs is approximately US$100 billion, of which: IBIT (BlackRock) holds approximately US$46.3 billion; Fujita (FBTC) holds approximately US$16.2 billion; and GBTC (Grayscale) holds approximately US$15.8 billion.
The Ethereum ETF was approved shortly afterwards. Although its size is far smaller than that of Bitcoin, it has also achieved impressive results: According to SoSoValue data, the total fund size of the Ethereum spot ETF is currently about US$6 billion, of which: ETHE (Grayscale) holds approximately US$2.5 billion; ETHA (BlackRock) holds approximately US$2.4 billion.
In addition to ETFs, multiple tracks closely related to on-chain finance have experienced explosive growth, building an important bridge for the integration of on-chain finance and traditional finance.
In 2024, RWA experienced explosive growth, with a total value exceeding US$19 billion (excluding stablecoins), an annual growth rate of more than 85%, and tokenized credit, tokenized government bonds, and tokenized real estate becoming the main driving forces.
In addition, according to Coinglass data, the annual transaction volume of stablecoins will exceed US$8.3 trillion in 2024, and the total market value will exceed US$210 billion. At the same time, traditional giants including Stripe, PayPal, and SpaceX have all made arrangements in the stablecoin track.
At the same time, in November 2024, Trump’s victory in the US election brought more positive expectations for an on-chain financial explosion.
This always unexpected US president spared no effort to practice a crypto-friendly attitude before officially taking office: not only did he attend the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville with great fanfare to give a speech, the emergence of the $TRUMP Meme also demonstrated his huge influence in the crypto field.
Just two months after taking office, the Trump administration has implemented more than a dozen crypto policies, including signing an executive order to strengthen U.S. leadership in digital financial technology, the SEC establishing a crypto task force and dropping lawsuits against multiple crypto companies, overturning the IRS's DeFi broker rules, and announcing five major crypto strategic reserves including BTC, ETH, XRP, SOL, and ADA.
Under the slogan of "Make America Great Again", Crypto has clearly become an important tool for the United States to consolidate its important position as the "heart of global finance".
In fact, the influence of this crypto-friendly trend in the United States is not limited to the United States.
As on-chain finance has blossomed in many parts of the world and many countries have to face up to crypto regulation, many regulatory policies in the United States have provided a good demonstration effect, which will also lead to other countries/regions following suit, thereby promoting the establishment of a clearer crypto regulatory framework. For example, the EU Crypto-Asset Market Regulation Act (MiCA), which officially came into effect in early 2025, has further brought a "referenced" crypto development environment to European countries.
Compared with the Western world led by the United States, the competition among Eastern countries/regions to promote clear regulation and seize the blockchain finance is more intense. Previously, countries including Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, India, Dubai and others have issued relevant policies to regulate the development of the crypto economy.
In 2025, when on-chain finance becomes a consensus between the East and the West, Eastern countries/regions are more open and active in exploring crypto regulation. Taking Hong Kong, an international financial port, as an example, the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) recently released the "A-S-P-I-Re" roadmap for the Hong Kong virtual asset market, which includes 12 specific measures, aiming to further focus on the participation of institutional investors.
If the high capital efficiency of on-chain finance is the original driving force that prompts traditional finance to accelerate its move to the chain, then a clearer, open and inclusive regulatory environment will further eliminate the worries of traditional finance moving to the chain and encourage institutions to adopt more proactive chain strategies.
In fact, this trend has already emerged:
In the Western world, well-known institutions including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, MicroStrategy, etc., and in the Eastern world, well-known institutions such as Sony, Samsung, and HSBC have all taken concrete actions.
Another very obvious phenomenon is the upsurge in ETF applications. Currently, many institutions have submitted ETF applications to the SEC, including Ripple (XRP), Solana (SOL), Litecoin (LTC), Cardano (ADA), Hedera (HBAR), Polkadot (DOT) and DogeCoin (DOGE).
As institutions bring in more funds and users, 2025 will become an important turning point for the explosion of on-chain finance.
Facing the trend, how can we become the main competitor in the on-chain financial game? The key is to improve both internally and externally:
Externally embrace compliance: Compliance will become the core criterion for institutions to participate in on-chain finance. Actively embracing supervision will further eliminate institutions’ concerns about supervision and bring a healthy and stable environment for the development of on-chain finance.
Internally, we will improve ourselves: We will continue to optimize transaction speed, transaction costs, user experience, and security, and continuously enhance the service capabilities of blockchain as an infrastructure to accommodate large-scale capital users.
How do the main competitors perform in the face of these two paths?
The two compliance leaders from the East and the West: a guest of honor at the White House and a regulatory pioneer in the Hong Kong government
Coinbase in the West, HashKey in the East.
This analogy, which is widely circulated in the community, stems not only from the fact that both companies have crypto empires with extensive business scope, but also from the firm determination and similar paths they have shown in compliance.
As the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States and the first listed cryptocurrency company in the United States, Coinbase's road to compliance has been tortuous, but after the crypto-friendly government centered on Trump came to power, it has gradually "cleared the clouds and seen the moon":
In June 2023, the SEC announced a lawsuit against Coinbase and demanded that Coinbase "permanently ban" related businesses, but in February 2025, the SEC withdrew the lawsuit against Coinbase.
At the same time, in the past few years, Coinbase has been committed to compliant operations. It not only has money transmission licenses in various states in the United States, but also has obtained compliance operating licenses in countries including the United Kingdom, the European Union, Singapore, and Japan.
As a guest of honor at the first White House Digital Asset Summit, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong sat fourth from the left of Trump. He also publicly stated in a media interview that he was willing to serve as the government's crypto asset custodian in the context of national reserves. Coinbase has cooperated with multiple government departments in crypto asset custody and trading.
In addition, Coinbase also revealed that it will actively push Congress to quickly implement stablecoin legislation and market structure bills.
As a representative of the East, HashKey, rooted in Hong Kong, is regarded as a well-deserved compliance pioneer in the eyes of many community members:
Hong Kong not only has a superior geographical location, able to link up with mainland China, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia and other regions to play the role of an important financial hub in the Asia-Pacific region, but also as one of the four Asian tigers, Hong Kong has a sound financial foundation, an active financial innovation atmosphere and a large number of professional talents in the fields of finance, technology and law accumulated over a long period of time, which are unmatched by other cities.
Previously, Hong Kong's financial fertile soil has successfully nurtured many leading institutions in the encryption industry, such as Amber Group, Crypto.Com, BitMEX, etc. According to the "Hong Kong Fintech Ecosystem Report" released by Invest Hong Kong, there are more than 1,100 fintech companies in Hong Kong, including 175 blockchain application or software companies and 111 digital asset and cryptocurrency companies.
In 2023, Hong Kong further clarified the direction of "making blockchain a key development area" and officially launched the virtual asset service provider (VASP) license application system. With the introduction of a series of policies such as the gradual opening of innovative products such as ETFs and virtual asset funds to ordinary investors, Hong Kong is attracting worldwide attention as a "chain financial innovation center."
As one of the first crypto companies to apply for a Hong Kong license, HashKey is also one of the first important forces to support Hong Kong's vigorous development of the blockchain economy and actively embrace compliance. Currently, HashKey has officially obtained Type 1, Type 4 and Type 9 licenses issued by the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC), expanding its business scope and capabilities under the supervision of the SFC in many aspects.
Taking Hong Kong as the starting point, over the past year, HashKey has made rapid progress in its compliance process in many countries around the world, and has successively obtained the major payment institution license issued by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the Japanese crypto exchange operating license, the Class F license issued by the Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA), and the Dubai Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (VARA)'s in-principle approval (IPA) for its virtual asset service provider (VASP) license application.
At the same time, HashKey Group also stated that it will continue to advance its global licensing matrix in the next five years, explore markets including the Middle East and Europe, and gradually expand its on-chain financial services capabilities to the world.
As a chain specially built by HashKey for on-chain finance and RWA, HashKey Chain will continue HashKey's compliance advantages, and is committed to building a compliance-oriented on-chain financial infrastructure and creating a full-stack solution connecting Web2 and Web3.
The potential that compliance brings to HashKey is also reflected in the growth of specific business, especially in terms of institutional cooperation:
In 2025, HashKey Chain not only successfully launched the Bosera HashKey BTC ETF and the Bosera HashKey ETH ETF, but also established in-depth cooperation with a number of well-known institutions such as Futu Securities, Tiger Brokers, Cinda International Asset Management, and ZhongAn Bank.
At the same time, HashKey Exchange attracted over HK$10 billion in capital, and its cumulative trading volume exceeded HK$600 billion.
In addition to similar compliance paths, blockchain is the infrastructure that carries on-chain finance, and as Coinbase and HashKey have both launched their L2 crypto asset management groups, it is easy for us to focus on Base and HashKey Chain.
On-chain financial foundation: the game between compliant stablecoins and tokenized financial products
We can find a lot of commonalities between Base and HashKey Chain.
As infrastructure, both aim to become the foundation for a new generation of on-chain financial technology, and both are working hard to optimize performance to better carry large amounts of funds and users.
The Base mainnet was officially launched as early as 2023. In less than two years, it has become one of the hottest L2s. According to Artemis data, Base's net capital inflow in the fourth quarter of 2024 exceeded US$2.5 billion, and the number of daily transactions was about 11.1 million. In the AI Agent and Meme craze in 2024, Base demonstrated its strong ability to attract money and its ability to carry large-scale users' frequent on-chain interactions.
On the other hand, although HashKey Chain has been online for only more than two months, whether from the rapidly growing on-chain data or the series of functions designed for institutional-level adoption, we can feel HashKey Chain's ambition to build the preferred blockchain for finance and RWA.
As an Ethereum Layer 2 built on OP Stack, HashKey Chain has the advantages of EVM compatibility, high throughput, and scalability. According to public data, HashKey Chain has an average block time of 2 seconds, a gas fee as low as 0.1 Gwei, and a TPS of 400, and is committed to bringing an outstanding on-chain financial interaction experience.
During the testnet phase, HashKey Chain has completed 25.816 million transactions, registered over 870,000 wallet addresses, and participated in 300,000 community members. According to hashkey.blockscout data, after more than two months on the mainnet, the total transaction volume of HashKey Chain exceeded 8.34 million, and the total number of addresses exceeded 208,000.
At the same time, for institutions with large capital, security is the primary consideration for participating in on-chain finance, and HashKey Chain has made sufficient preparations for this:
HashKey Chain's smart escape hatch synchronizes the state Merkle tree to Layer 1 once at fixed block intervals, achieving the ultimate guarantee of asset security.
At the same time, multi-level DAO governance makes the Security Committee DAO responsible for quickly responding to possible security threats, while the Technical Audit DAO focuses on in-depth analysis and verification to further enhance the security factor of HashKey Chain.
In addition, through cooperation with Chainlink, Chainlink CCIP will serve as the standard cross-chain infrastructure of HashKey Chain, thereby effectively avoiding common cross-chain security issues such as double-spending attacks and cross-chain reentry attacks, ensuring that HashKey Chain provides reliable and secure cross-chain services; Chainlink Data Streams will serve as the official data solution of HashKey Chain, bringing low-latency, real-time, and tamper-proof market data to HashKey Chain, opening the door to innovation in high-frequency trading and derivatives trading scenarios.
Of course, in the public chain infrastructure arms race, in addition to the hard power of performance, the soft power of ecological construction has attracted more attention.
In this regard, although Base and HashKey Chain are both committed to seizing the development opportunities of on-chain finance in 2025, they have different plans for their respective ecological entry point choices.
Base focuses on the compliant stablecoin USDC :
Stablecoins provide a stable medium of exchange and serve as a bridge for rapid exchange and efficient flow between different crypto assets. Their importance is self-evident. Compliant stablecoins further provide a compliant path for traditional financial funds to participate in on-chain financial activities, which is of great significance in promoting the penetration of the Base ecosystem in more financial scenarios such as payment and RWA, and attracting institutional participation.
In 2018, Circle and Coinbase jointly launched USDC, the first stablecoin supported by a centralized exchange, with Coinbase mainly responsible for the US dollar reserves behind USDC. USDC's main advantage is compliance. Among the two major issuers behind it, Circle has a full license in the United States and payment licenses in the United Kingdom and the European Union, and Coinbase's compliance advantage cannot be underestimated. In July last year, Circle obtained compliance and issued USDC and EURC qualifications under the MiCA Act.
Through the compliant stablecoin USDC, Base not only brings a better on-chain financial experience to developers and users, such as the gas fee discounts that users enjoy when paying with USDC, but also promotes the integration and expansion of the Base ecosystem with traditional finance: Currently, the Base ecosystem has emerged with multiple native stablecoin payment applications such as Peanut and LlamaPay.
HashKey continues to develop its advantages in institutional cooperation. HashKey Chain focuses on the tokenization of financial products and builds the preferred blockchain for finance and RWA:
Institutions manage large amounts of funds and users. The participation of institutions will lead to the on-chain deposit of a large amount of funds and the influx of incremental users, which is an important sign of the maturity and scale of on-chain finance. HashKey Chain aims to clear obstacles for institutional participation by providing institutions with efficient and compliant financial product tokenization solutions.
The tokenized U.S. dollar money market fund "CPIC Estable MMF" initiated and managed by China Pacific Insurance Investment Management Co., Ltd. (Hong Kong) was successfully deployed based on HashKey Chain. It is a demonstration case of HashKey Chain using the tokenization of financial products as a starting point to build a preferred platform for finance and RWA.
For institutions, HashKey Chain significantly reduces the technical threshold and operating costs of institutional financial products on the chain through compliance-friendly, secure and reliable, high-performance and low-cost, and complete on-chain DeFi ecosystem to empower asset liquidity and application scenarios, making CPIC Estable MMF an effective digital asset allocation tool to help institutions achieve transparent, efficient and refined management of fund shares on the blockchain.
For DeFi users, by providing institutions with efficient financial product tokenization tools, on-chain financial users will have access to more high-quality assets with real returns and obtain more diverse sources of income.
As for on-chain finance, as more and more institutional-level assets choose to undergo digital transformation on HashKey Chain, on-chain finance is accelerating its integration with traditional finance and playing an increasingly important role in the global financial system.
According to HashKey data, the subscription scale of CPIC Estable MMF on the first day of operation has exceeded 100 million US dollars, further reflecting the huge market demand for the tokenization of institutional financial products. As HashKey Chain continues to promote in-depth cooperation with multiple institutions, HashKey Chain will further become an ideal platform for the tokenization of financial products such as bonds, funds, and stablecoins, and help the leapfrog development of on-chain finance and RWA.
The two paths have their own advantages and disadvantages. Both paths carry the grand vision of boosting the explosion of on-chain finance and have achieved breakthrough achievements at their respective entry points. However, as on-chain finance is still in its early stages, perhaps Base and HashKey Chain need more specific scenarios of deep integration of off-chain and on-chain finance to verify their feasibility. We also need to look at it from a longer-term perspective.
When it comes to predicting the future, perhaps the 2025 roadmaps announced by the two companies can provide more long-term perspectives.
Multiple initiatives in parallel: welcoming the golden age of on-chain financial development
In the 2025 roadmap released by Base, we can clearly see the two parallel tracks of technology and ecology:
In terms of technology, Base will focus on OnchainKit, Paymaster and L3 to improve the experience;
In terms of ecology, Base aims to open up more than 25 fiat currency channels and is committed to introducing 25 million users and 25,000 developers. At the same time, the on-chain asset size will reach US$100 billion this year.
Compared with Base's data vision, HashKey Chain's 2025 roadmap focuses on tracks such as BTCFi, PayFi, RWA and stablecoins, and introduces more specific measures in focusing on on-chain finance, expanding the scale of developers, attracting large-scale funds to the chain, and building a compliance-oriented on-chain financial infrastructure.
On the one hand, the Wrapped BTC asset HashKey BTC (HBTC) issued by HashKey Chain is coming soon:
This product aims to focus on the trillion-dollar BTCFi market and bring users compliant, stable and substantial on-chain returns, including lending returns, liquidity mining returns, re-staking returns and HashKey points.
On the other hand, with the vision of "finance and RWA first blockchain", HashKey Chain will continue to focus on the RWA track and continuously improve the tokenization services of institutional-level financial products:
Previously, HashKey Group had cooperated with Cinda International Asset Management to launch the first STBL project issued by a Hong Kong financial institution. The relevant assets of STBL are AAA-rated money market funds (MMFs) portfolios. Each STBL has a face value of $1 and can be transferred 24/7. The daily accumulated interest will be automatically distributed to professional investor wallets in the form of newly issued tokens on the monthly dividend payment date. In the near future, the issuance of STBL will be expanded to HashKey Chain.
At the same time, HashKey Chain will also promote the tokenization of traditional assets such as real estate, commodities and artworks, and promote asset liquidity and market transparency.
More importantly, based on the deep cooperation relationship with many institutions, HashKey Chain's Hong Kong dollar stablecoin is brewing:
Previously, HashKey Exchange has reached cooperation with Yuanbi Technology, Allinpay International and other companies, and the Hong Kong dollar stablecoin issued based on HashKey Chain will soon be available to everyone. The stablecoin ecosystem based on HashKey Chain will further promote the prosperity and development of cross-border payments and decentralized financial solutions on HashKey Chain, and accelerate the realization of the on-chain transformation of global finance.
At the developer level, a number of developer incentive policies also demonstrate HashKey Chain’s determination to build on-chain finance:
When the HashKey Chain mainnet was officially launched, the Atlas Grant program with a total prize pool of up to 50 million US dollars was launched. The program aims to deeply discover high-quality projects in the Web3 field and provide comprehensive empowerment to help the exponential growth of the HashKey Chain application layer and on-chain users. The first phase of Atlas Grant ended on January 20, 2025, and the second, third, fourth and fifth phases will be launched in Q2, Q3 and Q4 of 2025.
In addition, a series of HashKey Hacker House and Hackathon events will be held in many cities around the world, including South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Thailand, providing developers with a platform to communicate and directly communicate with HashKey Chain core team members and obtain support.
From embracing compliance to building a secure, efficient, institution-friendly and diversified on-chain financial ecosystem based on tracks such as BTCFi, RWA and stablecoins, HashKey is becoming an important force in promoting the deep integration of on-chain finance and traditional finance.
Whether it is Coinbase and its high-performance Layer 2 Base in the West, or HashKey and its preferred public chain for finance and RWA in the East, HashKey Chain, they are all promoting the prosperity and development of on-chain finance in their own ways. This parallel pattern between the East and the West not only shows the diversified paths of on-chain finance, but also reveals the profound trend of changes in the global financial system.
As the community put it:
Coinbase in the West, HashKey in the East
Base in the West, HashKey Chain in the East
Perhaps with the almost irreversible trend of clearer regulation and institutions entering the market one after another, it would be better for the two to talk about co-construction rather than competition.
With San Francisco, where Coinbase is located, and Hong Kong, where HashKey is located, as the two centers, and Base's compliant stablecoin and HashKey Chain's institutional financial product tokenization as the two major levers, facing the golden age of the full outbreak of on-chain finance, perhaps we can look forward to the fact that in the future, both Base and HashKey Chain will promote the establishment of on-chain financial order in the East and the West with a win-win attitude, and at the same time accelerate the earlier arrival of global on-chain financial changes.
