It’s been another busy month for Hex Trust during September as we onboarded several new clients and closed a couple of strategic partnerships. Here’s a review of what we’ve been working on and the key highlights from the digital asset ecosystem.
Terra has partnered with Hex Trust to enable the integration of the Terra blockchain and the support of staking services for the Luna token, within our custody platform. Terra is building a new financial infrastructure powered by a family of stablecoins, each pegged to major fiat currencies all algorithmically stabilized by Terra’s native governance and staking token, Luna. Their payments app, Chai, has risen to become one of the most popular apps built with blockchain with over 3% of the South Korean population using Chai to pay for goods and services. Currently, they have over 2 million users and an annual run rate of US$1 billion.
Daniel Hwang, Head of Ecosystem Development at Terraform Labs:
“At Terra, we’ve consistently strived to build our ecosystem into open financial infrastructure that will make money within easiest to spend and most attractive to hold. The mass adoption we’ve achieved through the Chai payments app in addition to the robust blockchain infrastructure created provides a clear path for partnering with Hex Trust to bring in natural next steps for adoption of DeFi applications like Anchor and bridging the gaps between CeFi and DeFi.”
Linear Finance selected Hex Trust as their digital asset custodian and to provide a custody solution with a consensus-based approval mechanism. Linear Finance is the first cross-chain compatible, decentralized delta-one asset protocol to create, trade, and manage synthetic assets (Liquids). Linear Finance is a faster, cheaper, safer, and easier to use alternative compared to other synthetic asset protocols, coupled with access to a wealth of creative investment assets.
Kevin Tai, Cofounder of Linear Finance:
“Linear Finance’s vision is to democratize investments assets to all users. The integration of a secure gateway built by Hex Trust will allow institutional clients to access LINA and our synthetic assets in the near future, facilitating institutional inclusion into DeFi. Hex Trust has the highest level of security for a range of wallets and digital assets, and also the flexibility to customise to specific requirements and our needs, supporting Linear Finance in the long term.”
MANTRA DAO appointed Hex Trust to be its digital asset custodian for its fundraising campaign and to secure all the funds raised by the MANTRA DAO Foundation. MANTRA DAO is built on Parity Substrate for the Polkadot ecosystem and is a community-governed DeFi platform focusing on Staking, Lending, and Governance.
John Patrick Mullin, Co-Founder and Council Member at The MANTRA DAO Foundation:
“As DeFi services receive more and more attention we must elevate the industry’s standards and adopt an uncompromising approach of our users’ assets security. Looking at Hex Trust’s track record and client portfolio, this partnership appeared like a no brainer.”
RioDeFi entered a custodial agreement with Hex Trust to safeguard their digital assets. Rio DeFi’s mission is to accelerate the mass adoption of digital assets by bridging traditional and decentralized finance. They’re developing applications that connect people to digital assets, mobile payments, and DeFi services such as savings and lending.
James Anderson, CEO at RioDeFi:
“Our core vision at RioDeFi is to bridge the world of digital currencies with the traditional financial and banking systems. Working with Hex Trust helps us minimize the technical and operational risks associated with holding large amounts of digital assets. We are thrilled to collaborate with them in redefining our industry’s standards in terms of asset security and overall project accountability.”
We continue to enhance our Hex Safe platform around six key pillars which can be seen below. Our mission is to ensure the constant development of these key aspects along with flexible deployment options for our clients.
Enabling exceptional security and liquidity for digital assets at enterprise scale
Publication: IBM
IBM recently created a feature on Hex Trust and explained how we’ve partnered to build the leading bank-grade custody platform.
The rise of digital custodians
Publication: The Asset
Our Co-founder & CEO, Alessio Quaglini, was recently interviewed and profiled on how we’re helping traditional finance institutions access the digital asset ecosystem.
Hex Trust Joins Hands with Terra to Offer Custody and Staking Facilities
Publication: CryptoNewsZ
Our partnership with Terra was profiled including how we’re integrating the Luna token into our custody platform.
Total value locked (USD) in DeFi continues to grow
The amount locked in DeFi platforms over September continued to increase. Are we hitting a peak or will the market continue to increase? Only time will tell.
Uniswap issued governance tokens
The most popular decentralized exchange issued its own governance token, UNI, to all users who had previously interacted with its smart contract. 150 million UNI, or 15% of the token’s supply, was available to be claimed — many said it was the best token distribution we have ever seen.
NFTs are the new hot tokens
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have been hitting the headlines recently. Most of them are ERC-720 compliant and used for crypto-collectables like art and gaming. NFTs generally help to provide a means of authenticity and ownership. There’s nothing new about the concept, however, some NFTs are being used in yield farming which has brought back their popularity. The next wave of yield farming could include gaming aspects where NFTs have a strong use-case.
Kucoin hacked
The Singaporean headquartered exchange was hacked for over US$200M. The hackers have since been identified and many assets were recovered reverting protocols or freezing balances. One positive note is the strength the crypto community showed, as exchanges and projects rallied together offering support to help in order to minimize losses. The hack has confirmed the importance of exchanges and blockchain projects to rely on custody specialists to provide additional security and insurance coverage for their assets.
MicroStrategy Doubles Down On Bitcoin
The publicly listed company made headlines when it announced in August it was moving US$500 million in treasury reserves out of cash and at least US$250 million were to be moved into bitcoin. In September, they announced its final bitcoin purchases totalled US$425 million. Many analysts predict this will be the start of more large corporates purchasing bitcoin as a hedge against inflation.
ECB intensifies its work on a digital euro
The European Central Bank (ECB) published a comprehensive report on the possible issuance of a digital euro, prepared by the Eurosystem High-Level Task Force on central bank digital currency (CBDC) and approved by the Governing Council.
A digital euro would be an electronic form of central bank money accessible to all citizens and firms — like banknotes, but in a digital form — to make their daily payments in a fast, easy and secure way. It would complement cash, not replace it. The Eurosystem will continue to issue cash in any case.
