Oct 31, 2024

Hex Trust partners The Stacks Asia Foundation to integrate Stacks and implement on-ramps for Stacks DeFi applications Hex Trust , a fully-licensed provider of digital asset custody and markets services, has on Wednesday announced its partnership with the Stacks Asia Foundation , which will include support for the Stacks layer and all Stacks-based assets on its custody platform. Hex Trust said in a statement that it will also run its own Stacks Signer, joining a roster of top names in the industry, and offering Stacking services, with additional plans to implement on-ramps to Stacks DeFi applications once WalletConnect support is ready. An early initiative will include support for SIP-010, the standard for creating and managing fungible tokens on the Stacks blockchain, allowing them to be easily transferred, tracked, and used across different applications. It is noted that the integration aligns with Hex Trust’s strong and established presence in Asia and the Middle East, where they hold regulatory licenses in Hong Kong, Singapore (IPA), and Dubai, and complements the recent establishment of the Stacks Asia Foundation. This partnership is also a major milestone in Hex Trust’s push into the burgeoning Bitcoin Layer-2 ecosystem. With over $5 billion in assets under custody and more than 300 institutional clients, including prominent institutions from both Web2 and Web3, Hex Trust’s support for Stacks highlights the growing institutional adoption and accessibility for the Stacks blockchain in the Asian market and globally. “Hex Trust’s support for Stacks unlocks ample opportunities for institutional investors in our region,” said Kyle Ellicott, Executive Director at the Stacks Asia Foundation. “As a long-time industry-leading custodian throughout greater Asia and the Middle East, Hex Trust provides a vital pathway for the Stacks Ecosystem to expand further in the world’s most transformative markets,” he added. Calvin Shen, Chief Commercial Officer at Hex Trust, added their partnership with the Stacks Asia Foundation is a strategic move to enhance the financial utility of Bitcoin for their institutional clients. “We are excited to support both Stacks and its burgeoning ecosystem of builders globally and to help the protocol scale into new markets,” he added. Established in 2018, Hex Trust offers regulated institutional digital asset custody, staking, and markets services to builders, investors, and service providers. Stacks is a Bitcoin L2 that enables smart contracts and decentralized applications to use Bitcoin as a secure base layer. The 2024 Nakamoto and sBTC releases will bring faster speeds and transactions backed by 100% Bitcoin finality. ‍Stacks is the current leading Bitcoin L2 by developer traction and market cap and is poised to help unlock Bitcoin and its $500 billion in passive capital as a fully programmable, productive asset. The Stacks (STX) token, used as gas on the L2, was the first to undergo an SEC-qualified sale in the United States. The project explicitly decentralized with the mainnet launch in 2021. In the Stacks ecosystem, there are currently 30+ contributing entities including a non-profit Stacks Foundation, a developer tooling company Hiro, Xverse, Trust Machines, Mechanism, Bitcoin L2 Labs, ALEX, Bitcoin Frontier Fund, and more.