HONG KONG, April 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — During the Web3 Festival, Dr. Xiao Feng, Chairman and CEO of HashKey Group, officially released the 3rd whitepaper in the Web3 Economy research series: On-Chain Finance and Tokenization in the Era of the Agent Economy.
The whitepaper centers on the trend of AI Agents accelerating their participation in production, collaboration, and trading. It systematically explores the evolution of on-chain finance and tokenization infrastructure in the agent economy era, further outlining the developmental logic of the next phase of the Web3 economy across production, value, institutional structures, and business.
Over the past three years, HashKey Group has conducted continuous research into the Web3 economy from the two previous whitepapers.
HashKey believes that industry evolution over the last two years has validated several key judgments: Stablecoins are gradually evolving into the cash settlement layer of the on-chain financial system. RWA (Real-World Assets) are moving toward broader institutional-grade applications and blockchain has truly become an institutional tool for hosting new relations of production.
Meanwhile, as AI Agents become vital participants in a new round of production, collaboration, and exchange, the original on-chain financial system faces new upgrade requirements. This whitepaper aims to deep dive how must on-chain finance and tokenization upgrade their infrastructure as Agents begin to participate in economic activities at scale.
The whitepaper points out that as AI Agents increasingly participate in production and trade, future economic activity will shift from human-to-human interaction to high-frequency collaboration between humans and Agents, as well as Agent-to-Agent interactions.
Traditional financial systems were not built for the Agent economy. Their logic relies on physical accounts, manual audits, intermediary brokerage, and staged clearing—processes best suited for low-frequency, high-value activities with high human involvement. Facing the high-frequency, small-amount, and automated needs of Agents, the limitations of this system in terms of efficiency, cost, and response speed become more apparent.
The whitepaper argues that this is where the value of on-chain finance lies. Its advantage is not just speed, but its suitability for serving Agents as a new type of economic entity:
- Granularity: Blockchain Tokens can break down assets, permissions, and revenue distribution into finer units, turning vague rights into clearly defined, programmable digital units.
- Automation: Smart contracts embed trading rules and profit-sharing logic directly into code, enabling automatic execution when conditions are met, significantly reducing manual intervention.
- Unified Ledger: A unified on-chain ledger allows multiple parties to complete accounting, settlement, and distribution within the same system, reducing intermediary steps and collaboration costs.
Furthermore, the whitepaper defines a Dual-Token Architecture for the first time: AI Tokens serve as the minimum semantic unit for computing power consumption, while Blockchain Tokens act as the minimum programmable unit for value flow. Additionally, HashKey’s previously proposed Three-Token Model remains vital, with SBTs (Soulbound Tokens) expected to play a larger role in Agent identity, permission management, and reputation building.
Infrastructure Upgrades: A New Business Paradigm for the Agent Economy
The whitepaper provides a detailed deconstruction of on-chain financial infrastructure, including:
- The leap from double-entry bookkeeping to distributed ledgers.
- The replacement of real-name accounts by cryptographic addresses easily called by Agents.
- The realization of “trading is settlement” as the ultimate form of transaction.
The whitepaper posits that the Agent economy can only form a true closed loop with real-world business systems when Real-World Assets can be mapped on chain in a readable, callable, and settleable manner.
Real-world asset tokenization is currently progressing along three paths: Currency Tokenization, Traditional Financial Asset Tokenization, and Physical/Alternative Asset Tokenization. This process will not only change how assets are expressed but also reshape global liquidity organization and business collaboration structures.
HashKey Group will continue to conduct research and practice in fields like on-chain financial infrastructure, RWA, stablecoins, and the Agent economy to drive Web3 toward a phase with greater commercial capacity that better serves the real economy.
About HashKey Holdings Limited
HashKey Holdings Limited （“HashKey”, the Company, Stock Code: 3887.HK） is an established comprehensive digital asset company in Asia with a global footprint, providing end-to-end financial infrastructure, technology and investment management to create a digital assets ecosystem. The Company offers a licensed digital asset platform to provide transaction facilitation services, on-chain services, and asset management services.
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