Hex Trust partnership latest leap in multi-decade roadmap

Hex Trust – Asia’s biggest digital asset custodian – has emerged as the latest Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR) integration partnership following a succession of major announcements from the distributed ledger blockchain.

In a move aimed at positioning the Hex Trust as an official custodian for the Hedera ecosystem, the partnership has introduced support for Hedera Token Services (HTS) alongside the Hedera blockchain on the Trust’s institutional-grade custody platform.

While seemingly innocuous, this integration represents a big play for Hedera – with Hex Trust primarily offering enterprise custodian services for large cryptocurrency exchanges – the potential scale of this partnership therefore marks significant progress on the decades-long project roadmap.

Little is left to the imagination when the use cases for a bank-grade Hedera-supporting custodian is taken into consideration. It would be reasonable to speculate that CBDCs are in the network’s sights – especially following the recent EMTECH CBDC technology integration.

But another, more pressing focus, is security tokens which are projected to be a $160tn industry by 2030, with the securitisation and fractionalisation of assets through highly liquid tokens a monumental force for change in the industry.

Back in November 2020, Hedera Hashgraph, launched a tokenisation engine called TOKO in a collaboration with DLA Piper

In November 2020, Hedera Hashgraph, together with global financial law firm DLA Piper launched the tokenisation engine – TOKO.

TOKO provides a platform for creating new markets and uses distributed ledger technology to disseminate market information and provide transparency for the fractionalisation and securitisation of assets.

Speaking to Coin Rivet, Hedera Hashgraph CEO Mance Harmon, explained what’s driven the partnership.

“With its focus on the highest security standards and enterprise-grade workflows, and rigorous approach to compliance, Hex Trust has established itself as a leading, bank-grade, Asian digital asset custodian,” he said.

“Given TOKO’s traction in the asset tokenisation market, we are excited to see Hex Trust appointed as an official custodian of TOKO, as a next step in the evolution of the growing digital assets ecosystem being built on the Hedera network.”

Exclusive Interview: CMO speaks Hedera Hashgraph roadmap

In an effort to find out more about the exciting progress being made on the Hedera Hashgraph project roadmap, Coin Rivet had an exclusive conversation with Hedera’s CMO Christian Hasker. He walked us through a string of recent successes.

“As well as listing HBAR on Bitstamp and announcing our partnership with Hex Trust, we also recently made the very big announcement that the Hedera Governing Council will allocate $5bn in HBAR (or, 20% of the total HBAR supply) to our ecosystem development fund,” explained Hasker.

“Over the last few weeks, we have also announced partnerships with SKUx and Sparkle, who will be using Hedera’s technology in some interesting ways within the retail sector – this represents a great opportunity to bring distributed ledger technology to mainstream, real-world applications.

“Each one of these milestones and announcements solidifies our position as the most used, sustainable, enterprise-grade public ledger for the decentralised economy.

“The Hedera roadmap takes us decades into the future and we are only at the beginning of this journey. Through each of these milestones, we’re making steps towards achieving our visions for Hedera, the Hedera Token Service (HTS), and the Hedera Consensus Service (HCS) to be the foundation of Web 3.0.”

The long roadmap at Hedera Hashgraph demonstrates the ambition and commitment to becoming a real-world blockchain set to empower the world around us. When asked what’s next for Hedera, his answer? Corporate and commercial integrations.

“In the coming months, we’ll have more industry-leading additions to the Hedera Governing Council, as well as a broad range of partnerships that leverage the Hedera Consensus Service (HCS) and the Hedera Token Service (HTS) to improve everyday processes and increase the efficiency of existing mainstream technologies.” he said.

This could hint at an interesting change of tack for the blockchain which, in the past, has focused heavily on institutional integrations with governments, intranational organisations, NGOs, and academic research institutes.

“In the context of governments and academic institutions, we know there is a huge unmet need for technology that enables organisations and institutions to verify and trust information at scale,” he highlighted.

“Payment providers, enterprises, and regulators are currently weighed down under the weight of slow and archaic business processes, while they face increasing concerns that their systems could be targeted by cyberattacks that result in data breaches.

“Even when a forward-thinking institution is willing to make the move to distributed ledger technology, there are five main issues they must address – trust, privacy, verification, cost, and speed.”

Read more: Hedera Hashgraph is 100x more eco-friendly than Visa, and 10,000,000x cleaner than Bitcoin