Crypto adoption is remarkably high in Africa. According to the Chainalysis Crypto Adoption Report, several of the world’s leading countries for crypto adoption are African, with Nigeria taking the highest rank overall. This is largely due to social and economic drivers across the continent, with digital assets offering a variety of benefits for African investors – such as protection against inflation, affordable cross-border transactions, and overall stronger financial access and inclusion.

In recent years, the digital asset market has experienced both explosive growth and sobering setbacks. The collapse of FTX in November 2022 highlighted a significant vulnerability within the crypto ecosystem – the inherent counterparty risk that emerges when exchanges serve as both trading venues and custodians, roles traditionally held separately to protect market participants.

Tokenization projects are making significant strides in financial markets, and beyond, by making financial and real world assets more accessible. As the market evolves, institutions require a secure and scalable solution that they can easily build and deploy. In September 2023, Fireblocks bolstered its tokenization capabilities with the acquisition of BlockFold, to provide a complete service layer of advisory, token customization, orchestration, and distribution.

Fireblocks now enables customers to use Hashnote’s regulated tokenized money market fund, US Yield Coin (USYC), as a collateral asset on Deribit through Fireblocks Off Exchange. This significant milestone marks the first time a major crypto derivatives exchange is supporting a regulated tokenized money market fund, and the first time this type of token is being used as collateral. USYC is a cross-collateral currency on Deribit.

TOKEN2049 Singapore was a melting pot of global leaders and cutting-edge trends in the crypto space with over 20,000 visitors, 400 exhibitors, and 600 side events. Amid all of the expert discussions and industry thought leadership, I sat down to examine what I thought were the most important takeaways from the world’s biggest crypto event.

In response to growing institutional demand, Fireblocks has launched an integration with Lido to provide easy and secure in-platform access to Lido’s liquid staking protocol and stETH token. Users can now stake their ETH, receive rewards, and use stETH for on-chain activities, including Fireblocks Off Exchange, which allows Fireblocks users to lock their stETH in a self-custodial collateral wallet to trade on exchanges like Deribit and Bybit.

In the ever-evolving landscape of global finance, a new paradigm is emerging that promises to reshape assets, investments, and financial transactions at a fundamental level. Welcome to the era of tokenization.

The operational infrastructure for digital asset security has been continuously evolving – shifting from single-key hardware wallets, to multi-sig smart contract wallets, to MPC or HSM-powered wallets. This infrastructure improvement has created greater operational efficiency, enabling trading firms to deploy more capital without compromising on security.

Download the “Solving the Crypto Trading and Operations Trilemma” cheat sheet The crypto trading and operations trilemma addresses three potentially complementary but opposing forces from an operations perspective – security, efficiency, and scalability. Security is the actual safety of your firm’s own funds, or those it manages on behalf of clients. Efficiency is how quickly you can respond to market moves, transfer assets, and settle balances.

As crypto markets continue to grow, there’s never been more competition for exchanges to grow their retail and institutional user bases. To create a competitive advantage against industry stalwarts (like Coinbase, Binance, or Gemini), exchanges must overcome key challenges that impact their ability to scale, offer differentiated products & services, and remain as secure as possible.