Xiao Feng: The AI Agent Economy Must Be Built on a New-Generation Financial Infrastructure

TechFlow News, May 29: Dr. Feng Xiao, Chairman and CEO of HashKey Group, stated at the “Hong Kong Digital Finance Summit 2026” that the practical implementation of the AI agent economy hinges on a new generation of on-chain financial infrastructure, and predicted that the scale of on-chain finance will reach $3–5 trillion within the next three years.

Dr. Xiao noted that as AI advances to the stage of agent collaboration, it will generate massive volumes of high-frequency, low-value, automated payment scenarios. Traditional banking systems—constrained by cost structures and account-based architectures—are ill-equipped to support such micro-payment demands. In contrast, blockchain, stablecoins, and tokenized deposits can enable near-identical marginal costs for payments ranging from one cent to one hundred million dollars. He further proposed that the future AI agent economy will comprise three layers: (1) the production factors layer (computing power, data, and AI tokens), (2) the transaction medium layer (payments and collaboration powered by digital currencies), and (3) the asset layer (novel digital assets generated by AI-driven economic activities).

Dr. Xiao also emphasized that Hong Kong possesses unique advantages in digital finance, owing to its inclusive common-law system, its acuity as an international financial center, and its forward-looking regulatory framework for virtual assets—among the first globally to be introduced.