jakiro
Today, Hashkey, known as Hong Kong’s first crypto stock, went public, but the current trend is a bit ugly:
The IPO was claimed to have been subscribed 395 times, with an issue price of HK$6.68.
As a result, the market started pouring less than half an hour after the market opened, and then the stock price dropped to the lowest of HK$6.12. Looking at the market, if it weren’t for the suspected big dealers to protect the market, the trend would be ugly.
Regarding this company, I spoke twice before the IPO.
Today I will talk about the reasons why I am not optimistic about the future development of this company. I hope you will not find me verbose.
Here I first declare two things:
First, I have no personal grudges with Hashkey. I respect Teacher Xiao Feng very much and am honored to be his WeChat friend. Many people know Hashkey.
Second, the future of Hashkey actually depends more on factors other than the team’s efforts, which is not convenient to discuss here.
Exchanges are the core business of the crypto industry, and many people compare Hashkey to Hong Kong’s Coinbase.
Such benchmarking is actually very misleading.
The right aspect is that Hashkey is indeed very similar to Coinbase in terms of business, focusing on compliance, and the business layout is basically similar.
Actually it’s not the same thing at all.
First of all, Coinbase is backed by the United States. The U.S. government relied on powerful administrative measures to drive away a number of first-class offshore exchanges such as Binance/OKX, and handed over the fertile U.S. market to U.S. compliance exchanges headed by Coinbase.
At the same time, Coinbase has priority in expanding its business in Canada/Europe and other U.S. allies, and these places have basically withdrawn theseFirst class offshore exchange.
From the perspective of market size, North America and Europe are still the largest (the local Chinese may be the dominant player).
Compliance will inevitably increase the cost of experience and transactions, but with the support of the government to forcibly divide the fertile market into compliance offices, Coinbase can naturally develop with ease.
Although Coinbase currently has a market value of nearly 70 billion, its price-to-earnings ratio is only 20 times. It can be said that this valuation is not a bubble at all for a leading company in an emerging industry.
But Hashkey is different. Only half of the Hong Kong government can really be considered as supporting the exchange.
On the one hand, Hashkey is the leading company that the Hong Kong government has announced to embrace encryption. It would be unacceptable not to support it on the face of it.
But in fact everyone understands it.
In the United States, the listing of the project owner Coinbase is basically purely a business issue, and the U.S. government basically does not interfere.
Not only that, Coinbase has been deeply involved in the formulation of key rules such as the “Genius Act” for stablecoins and the “Clearness Act” for crypto assets, and has great influence.
What about Hong Kong?
Hashkey’s currency listing business is considered to be abolished. In terms of rule formulation, it can only be regarded as a consultant or an external consultant.
More importantly, Hong Kong itself is an offshore financial center this round, and the hinterland market on which most of its business relies is mainland China.
This time the encryption policy strictly prohibits mainland users from participating, leaving Hashkey to develop only overseas markets.
It is impossible to compete with Coinbase in Europe and the United States. Now the confrontation between East and West is almost a foregone conclusion, and these countries are all choosing sides.
And developing into the Asian, African and Latin American markets means directly competing with first-class offshore exchanges such as Binance/OKX.
Not to mention Hashkey, even Coinbase will be beaten by offshore exchanges in these markets.
Therefore, Hong Kong’s support for Hashkey is very limited. Its hinterland market (Mainland China) cannot move, and the local market is very small.
If this IPO can go smoothly this time, the support that Hong Kong can provide is already great.
By the way, Hashkey also issued $HSK tokens before, claiming that it would use 20% of the profits to repurchase them, but now it has not repurchased them because it is not profitable.
But in theory it can be regarded as corresponding to 20% of the shares.
I put the trend chart of $HSK token here:
If Hashkey’s stock price is calculated based on the token’s market value of US$100 million, it should be US$500 million, which is about HK$4 billion, and the corresponding stock price is about HK$1.45…
I hope my calculation is inaccurate, and I hopeHashkey can get better and better~
