Hex Trust and Stacks Asia Foundation Announce Partnership to Bring Bitcoin Layer-2 to Institutional Investors in Asia and the Middle East

Hex Trust, a fully-licensed provider of digital asset custody and markets services, has on Wednesday announced its partnership with the Stacks Asia

Digital asset custodian Hex Trust has announced a partnership with the Stacks Asia Foundation to integrate support for the Stacks layer-2 (L2) protocol and all Stacks-based assets on its custody platform.

According to a Wednesday statement, Hex Trust will also operate its own Stacks Signer and offer Stacking services.

Once WalletConnect support is ready, the firm also plans to implement on-ramps to Stacks decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.

As an early initiative, Hex Trust will integrate support for SIP-010, the standard for creating and managing fungible tokens on the Stacks blockchain.

This will enable easy transfer, tracking, and utilization of these tokens across various applications.

The integration aligns with Hex Trust’s presence in Asia and the Middle East, where it holds regulatory licenses in Hong Kong, Singapore (IPA), and Dubai.

It also complements the recent establishment of the Stacks Asia Foundation, the foundation’s regional arm tasked with driving Stacks adoption in the world’s fastest-growing crypto market, a statement said.

The partnership marks a major step in Hex Trust’s push into the burgeoning Bitcoin L2 ecosystem, it noted.

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 that 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 stated.

Founded 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.