As traditional capital accelerates its layout, the cryptocurrency market in 2025 shows significant institutional characteristics, with enterprise-level large-scale transactions becoming prominent in the crypto industry. Specifically, the global listed companies' Bitcoin holdings surged by 16.11% quarter-on-quarter to 68,800 coins in the first quarter. The number of holding companies increased to 79, with single transactions over $5 million jumping 210% year-on-year, and over $2.1 billion in Bitcoin flowed from retail wallets to institutional custody accounts.
However, the market expansion is constrained by three major pain points: lack of compliance institutions, liquidity fragmentation, and fund safety concerns.
Against this backdrop, the over-the-counter (OPT) trading business of HashKey Exchange, a licensed platform in Hong Kong, has seen explosive growth, with its first-quarter trading volume surging over 400% year-on-year, a 28-fold increase in March alone, and daily trading volume breaking the $100 million mark in the second quarter. Through licensed compliance, liquidity aggregation, and a bank-grade security system, it is innovatively solving industry challenges.
Trust Crisis in Regulatory Vacuum: How Licensed Operation Rebuilds Industry Credibility
The core driver behind HashKey OPT's strong growth is its strict licensed operation, which builds a solid foundation for trading trust.
The virtual asset industry has long been plagued by the "unlicensed operation" trust dilemma. Non-compliant trading platforms often forge regulatory qualifications to create a compliant appearance, attracting investors with unrealistic high-yield promises, then implementing fund retention through withdrawal restrictions and additional clauses like "deposit" or "unlocking fees". Technically, these platforms generally have chaotic hot wallet private key management and ineffective cold and hot storage isolation, leading to frequent hacker attacks. By deliberately weakening KYC review processes, they objectively become gray channels for money laundering, Dark Web transactions, and even ransomware fund transfers. This ecosystem not only creates extremely high decision barriers for ordinary investors but also deters institutional investors due to high compliance risk assessment costs.
In stark contrast, HashKey Exchange, as one of the first licensed retail virtual asset exchanges in Hong Kong, holds licenses from the Hong Kong SFC for Type 1 (securities trading), Type 7 (automated trading services), and virtual asset trading platforms. It strictly operates in accordance with the Securities and Futures Ordinance and Anti-Money Laundering Ordinance, undergoing monthly penetrative supervision by the SFC. As of January 2025, HashKey is the only Hong Kong-licensed exchange in the global top ten on Coingecko (ranked 7th), with its compliance becoming a core indicator for institutional investors selecting partner platforms.
Licensed compliance effectively resolves the trust blind spots of traditional unlicensed platforms, providing institutional funds with a safety anchor equivalent to traditional financial markets. This is a key reason why many institutions and large investors choose HashKey's over-the-counter large-scale transactions.
Liquidity Stratification Dilemma: How Ecosystem Aggregation Breaks Through Trading Efficiency Bottlenecks
HashKey OPT's breakthrough in market efficiency stems from its creative solution to liquidity fragmentation, constructing an ultra-fast and precise trading execution system.
The virtual asset market has long faced uneven liquidity distribution, with thin order books on small and medium platforms leading to high slippage for large transactions, and top platforms' liquidity monopoly exacerbating market fragmentation. Institutional investors often encounter severe slippage when making large transactions in secondary markets, with non-top exchanges experiencing 1.5%-3% price impact for orders over $5 million. Market makers' quotation willingness is low, with bid-ask spreads expanding 2-3 times normal levels, and liquidity easily evaporating during market volatility. Some exchanges use "counter trading" to split large orders, extending trading time. Liquidity fragmentation forces institutions to distribute orders, intensifying market fragmentation in a vicious cycle. Therefore, institutional users need large-scale transactions to avoid such losses in secondary markets. HashKey OPT builds an industry-leading liquidity solution through 'aggregation + innovation'. Launched in 2024 with an 'instant exchange' feature and a dedicated 'large-scale transaction' section in April 2025, it aggregates over 20 global top-tier liquidity providers, leveraging a professional trading network and efficient matching mechanism to provide solid trading depth for large transactions, ensuring efficient and cost-controlled execution.
In Q1 2025, OPT business volume doubled from the previous quarter, becoming the fastest-growing core business segment. Simultaneously, the platform's deep collaboration with global top-tier banks enables one-stop settlement of fiat and digital assets, significantly reducing fund transfer friction. This combination of "liquidity aggregation + technological empowerment + settlement optimization" precisely addresses institutional clients' core demands for trading efficiency and cost control.
Fund Safety Concerns: A New Industry Paradigm Under Fund Safety Escort
Moreover, HashKey OPT's continuous market recognition stems from its innovative and precise fund safety protection through deep collaboration with global top-tier banks.
The virtual asset industry has long faced severe fund safety challenges. "Black U" risks loom like the Sword of Damocles, with potential fund freezes, legal disputes, and reputation collapse. Fiat deposit and withdrawal channels are chaotic, with irregular channels causing low fund transfer efficiency and regulatory risks. Additionally, asset custody has frequent vulnerabilities, with imbalanced cold and hot wallet ratios and hardware security module (HSM) deployment under 10%, leading to substantial institutional asset losses from hacker attacks. These compounded pain points make institutions hesitant about virtual asset transactions, limiting industry development momentum.
HashKey OPT has constructed a targeted protection system. All digital assets undergo strict on-chain checks, using blockchain analysis technology to trace asset origins and eliminate "Black U" risks from the source. Users trade directly with licensed exchanges, with licenses strictly reviewed by regulators like the Hong Kong SFC, ensuring legal and compliant transaction processes and avoiding illegal fund transfer vortexes. For fiat channels, it connects with mainstream banks like Standard Chartered, leveraging bank-grade risk control systems to ensure transparent fund transfers—a rare high-quality channel in the crypto realm that solves institutional fund entry compliance challenges. Simultaneously, it strengthens vault management using advanced technologies and management processes like multi-signature and real-time monitoring to ensure asset storage safety. This multi-dimensional protection of "on-chain traceability + licensed trading + compliant channels + smart vault" precisely addresses industry pain points, providing institutional investors with solid fund safety guarantees and injecting new momentum into virtual asset market healthy development.
Conclusion: Industry Insights from Single-Point Breakthrough to Ecosystem Reconstruction
HashKey OPT's explosive growth validates the market logic of "functional compliance and institutional trading". While the industry pays the trust cost of unlicensed chaos, HashKey's functional design based on licensed compliance, liquidity aggregation, and asset safety is defining a new paradigm for the virtual asset industry—only by transforming pain points into functional innovation fulcrums can a new sustainable growth cycle be opened in the institutional wave.
In the future, HashKey Exchange is poised to further drive the virtual asset market's transition from "wild growth" to "value-driven". Its explored model of "licensed compliance + high-efficiency liquidity + asset safety" not only provides a replicable path to breaking industry development bottlenecks but also proves to the traditional financial system that, in the balance of technological innovation and regulatory frameworks, the virtual asset market can completely mature into an important component of a robust financial ecosystem.
