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February was a pivotal month for Bitcoin and the entire digital assets market as Tesla announced they’d bought US$1.5 billion of Bitcoin. The ripple effects could be seen as institutional and retail investors started to FOMO causing Bitcoin’s price to hit record highs and Bitcoin’s market cap breaching US$1 trillion several days later.
From our side, we’ve certainly seen the positive effects and the news has been a catalyst to fast-track conversations with first-time market participants and institutions seeking to enter the industry.
Hex Trust partnered with Algorand and is integrating the Algorand blockchain into our fully licensed custody platform to support its native token (ALGO). The integration also supports Algorand-based assets such as Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), Stablecoins (e.g. USDC) and Security Token Offerings (STOs). As part of the partnership, Algorand and Hex Trust will support each other on projects and initiatives enabling the banking sector to adopt digital assets.
“The Algorand Foundation is delighted to be partnering with Hex Trust to bring the Algo and ASA based coins onto the Hex Safe platform. Providing clients who wish to embrace cryptocurrencies and tokens with a regulated and secure, yet highly flexible platform, on which to conduct transformational, instant, digital transactions — will accelerate the broad institutional adoption of digital currencies. We’re excited to collaborate with such a strong ecosystem partner in Asia.” — Sean Lee, CEO of the Algorand Foundation
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Hex Trust partnered with Aave, an open-source and non-custodial liquidity protocol for earning interest on deposits and borrowing digital assets. Hex Trust has integrated Aave, stkAAVE, and aTokens into our institutional-grade custody platform, Hex Safe. We’re also integrating the Aave Protocol within our new DeFi module which enables institutional clients to lend and borrow a range of digital assets directly from within Hex Safe.
“The DeFi ecosystem is unlocking liquidity and allowing retail users and financial institutions alike to utilise capital more effectively through DeFi’s transparent, interoperable, and cost-effective solutions. Hex Trust plays an important role in enabling institutional access to DeFi’s suite of financial tools and services in a secure and compliant way. We look forward to exploring further synergies with Hex Trust to onboard more institutions to DeFi.” — Stani Kulechov, CEO of Aave
We continued building Hex Safe to ensure it’s the leading bank-grade digital asset custody platform in the market. Here are some of our recent platform upgrades.
Newly Supported Assets
Wallet Whitelisting
It’s great to finally start participating and attending in-person events again after all these months in lockdown. On Friday 26th February we supported the Algorand Hackathon in Cyberport where our CEO, Alessio Quaglini, was a panellist during the opening event.
After Tesla announced their purchase of Bitcoin on 8th February, we saw a flurry of institutional investment into digital assets during the month. Square purchased another US$170 million and MicroStrategy topped up their balance with another US$1.026 billion. A place to keep track of all institutions that have bitcoin is here: bitcointreasuries.org
Bitcoin enjoyed a healthy pullback of ~25% over the last week. With the price now picking up again, many analysts are suggesting we’re far from topping out and still on track to see prices north of US$100K this year.
NFTs hit the headlines again with sales volume’s exploding. NFTs are cryptographic tokens that represent a unique asset on the blockchain. The main difference between NFTs and other cryptocurrencies is that NFTs are one-of-a-kind, and aren’t interchangeable or divisible. Popular examples include art, gaming assets, tokenized real assets, virtual real estate, and sports cards. Billionaire investors such as Mark Cuban, GaryVee and Chamath have jumped in accelerating the adoption rate. One example is NBA Top Shot which has over US$200M in sales and volumes increasing by 600%+ over the last 30 days.
Stay tuned for an upcoming announcement on how Hex Trust will be working with NFTs!
If you’d like to learn more about our digital asset custody services, schedule a demo, or explore partnering with us, please reply to this email or reach out at: enquiries@hextrust.com
