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Change is coming. Digital assets are set to revolutionize financial markets—the only question is when.
Breakthroughs in cryptographic, security and distributed ledger techniques are expanding the adoption of blockchain technology beyond payments and small-scale experimentation. Decentralized ledgers can now be used to create sovereign currencies, stablecoins, digital securities, and other types of tokenized contracts. For those brave enough to lead the way, there could be trillions of dollars of value to unlock.
So, what’s holding financial institutions back from widespread adoption? One factor is the lack of digital asset custody solutions that deliver on both accessibility and security, plus the ability to provide these capabilities at enterprise scale. Hex Trust aims to fill this gap in the market.
Rafal Czerniawski, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Hex Trust, explains: “There are many blockchain wallets out there, but few are designed to manage private keys at scale. We wanted to build a platform that was as easy to use as any other banking system, and that also offered bank-grade security and resilience.”
Market expansion
Opens access to a market worth trillions of dollars for its clients
Market growth
Digital assets market could reach USD 10 trillion by 2023
To create its digital asset custody platform, Hex Trust began looking for the right underlying infrastructure. In addition to scale, security and resilience, flexibility also topped the company’s selection criteria. “It was important to us to find an open platform to support our vision,” Czerniawski adds. “There are so many fantastic open-source tools out there that we didn’t want to lock ourselves into a proprietary technology.”
Hex Trust chose to build its digital asset custody platform, Hex Safe, on the IBM® LinuxONE solution with IBM Hyper Protect Virtual Servers. The IBM technology offered the ideal combination of security, performance, stability and openness to help make the company’s vision a reality.
“The combination of IBM LinuxONE and IBM Hyper Protect Virtual Servers gives us the most secure foundations possible,” comments Czerniawski. “IBM CryptoCards are the only HSMs [Hardware Security Modules] that are FIPS 140-2 Level 4 compliant. Since IBM LinuxONE is built on the same technology as IBM Z, we had no doubts about the processing power or reliability. At the same time, choosing IBM LinuxONE allows us to take advantage of a host of open-source tools with additional enterprise-grade features — the best of both worlds.”
Following a successful proof of concept (PoC) exercise, Hex Trust kicked off development of Hex Safe in close collaboration with IBM. The Hex Trust and IBM teams hold weekly calls and engage on a dedicated Slack channel to keep track of progress and overcome any issues fast.
“We were worried that working with such a big vendor might mean that we got lost in the mix,” Czerniawski says. “But we’ve been blown away by IBM—they’re always responsive, and their domain experts truly understand our industry and business priorities. They go above and beyond the expected. Just recently, they delivered custom cryptographic algorithms in just days and at no additional charge.”
Hex Safe enables users to securely store assets and to access services offered in the digital asset ecosystem, focusing on integrating brokers, prime brokers, exchanges, lending and borrowing platforms, staking solutions, and other custodians. Hex Trust is working with IBM to launch the solution. “Partnering with IBM lends credibility to the Hex Trust offering, because IBM has such a long and successful history of securing financial transactions,” Czerniawski adds.
By securely connecting capital and service providers across the digital asset ecosystem, Hex Trust is removing barriers to blockchain technologies for financial institutions. In this way, the company is helping to fast-track the transformation of financial markets.
“We believe that the size of the digital assets market could reach USD 10 trillion by 2023,” says Czerniawski. “With Hex Safe, built on IBM technology, Hex Trust and our clients can play our part in releasing this potential value.”
Working with IBM, Hex Trust is building a unique offering that stands out in the marketplace. By differentiating itself from competitors, the company is ideally positioned to capture market share. Czerniawski adds, “In choosing IBM, we get unmatched security and scalability for our platform, contributing to our competitive advantage.”
Hex Trust recently discovered a new delivery model for its platform on IBM Cloud®, helping to boost the appeal of its offering even more.
Czerniawski concludes: “We found out that IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Virtual Servers share the same architecture as the on-premises version, allowing us to run and deploy our software on IBM Cloud. This gives our prospects the option of running a PoC on IBM Cloud, only deploying IBM LinuxONE on-premises once they’ve seen the transformational benefits for themselves. Or they could choose to run their disaster recovery on IBM Cloud—it’s yet another great bonus of working with IBM.”
Through its Hex Safe digital asset custody platform Hex Trust ( (link resides outside of ibm.com) enables banks, financial institutions, asset managers and exchanges to safely, securely and efficiently operate digital asset businesses. The company is led by financial services experts and veteran banking technologists, and is fully licensed and insured.
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Produced in the United States of America, January 2021.
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