HashKey Group, a Hong Kong-based digital asset financial services firm, has announced plans to launch Asia’s largest multi-currency vehicle for bridging traditional finance and crypto.
The firm said Monday the fund would serve as an “institutional bridge between traditional financial capital and on-chain assets,” with a raise targeted to exceed $500 million for the first phase.
Structured as a perpetual vehicle, the DAT fund allows ongoing subscriptions and redemptions while channeling capital into both assets and ecosystem development.
HashKey said the model gives institutions a compliant way to participate in crypto markets and also directs resources toward public chains like Ethereum, creating what it described as a flywheel of investment, application, value capture, and liquidity exits.
It frames DATs as a “long-term structural opportunity,” arguing that it aligns better with crypto’s 24/7 volatility, compared to passive ETFs.
“By combining traditional financial price discovery logic with on-chain asset structures, DAT serves as a carrier mechanism for the next generation of asset forms,” the group said in a statement. Beyond being a new interface for traditional capital, DATs also create a path “for on-chain ecosystems to move toward compliance and globalization,” it said.
The firm did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comments on this point.
Disclosure: HashKey Capital, the investment arm of HashKey Group, is one of 22 investors in an editorially independent Decrypt.
DATs: ‘Powerful but dangerous’
Industry observers note that DAT funds sit between ETFs and listed treasuries as a function of how they deliver exposure and manage risk.
“ETFs are the cleanest, lowest-friction way to get price exposure with daily NAV, segregation of assets, and tight oversight,” Michael Repetny, co-founder and CEO of institutional-grade Solana staking infrastructure firm Marinade Labs, told Decrypt.
Yet compared to publicly-listed treasury companies such as Strategy, which can swing between “corporate actions” and “capital structure,” a DAT fund “sits in the middle,” Repetny said.
While a DAT fund can deliver “beta plus ‘operational alpha’ (e.g., staking, programmatic treasury, governance),” that flexibility comes “with higher manager risk and the need for robust controls,” he explained.
Still, Repetny warned that vertical integration is “powerful but dangerous” across investing, custody, and operations, risking conflicts of interest over “pricing and execution.”
Repetny said the baseline should include independent boards, clear conflict disclosures, external custody, best-execution across venues, on-chain transparency, and transparent staking policies.
“Without that, LPs aren’t buying ‘operational alpha’, they’re buying undisclosed basis risk,” he said.
The same concerns are surfacing among institutional service providers, who warn that conflicts can escalate when a firm both runs and invests in DAT projects.
“One of the major risks will be conflict of interest,” Charmaine Tam, head of OTC at Hong Kong-licensed financial institution Hex Trust, told Decrypt.
As a form of vertical integration, such a model “has proven problematic in the crypto industry,” Tam said, citing the collapse of FTX.
Operating DAT projects means a firm “has access to both its own capital and investor funds,” which could open risks where one “prioritizes its own investments over those of its clients, especially if it faces financial distress,” Tam explained.
Despite these factors, being situated in Hong Kong gives HashKey an “edge over U.S. markets,” Tam noted, citing how the latter is facing greater regulatory “scrutiny and fragmentation.”
Hong Kong’s efforts to become a digital asset hub has created “a supportive environment for innovation with clear rules,” Tam said. The U.S., she added, has been “largely reactive, with regulators often resorting to enforcement actions and ambiguous guidance.”