Today at ADX I have Alessio Quaglini, CEO and co-founder of Hex Trust. Welcome to the show, Alessio. Thanks for joining us.
Hex Trust is a regulated digital asset custodian and markets platform. How do you work with institutions in the UAE and globally?
Hex Trust has been working in the digital asset space for about eight years. What we do is provide a regulated infrastructure that allows our clients to safekeep, exchange, and transact digital assets across different regions and markets. In the UAE, everything started with VARA — one of the first regulators in the world to license digital asset custodians, and we were among the first to receive that license. We followed the same model in Hong Kong and Singapore. What that means for us is one single regulated perimeter with several critical corridors that allow our clients to move money and exchange digital assets regardless of where they are.
From your seat on the Asia-Gulf corridor, where are the capital and payment flows into the Gulf coming from today?
It's mainly Asian. Hong Kong and Singapore capital and businesses are moving into the Gulf, and money is also heading back the other way. Globally, there's still a lot happening in the US as the rulebook gets written. But on the ground in the UAE, the flows are increasingly Asian — that's the corridor that is growing fastest. We're seeing stablecoin flows coming from multiple countries across Asia into the Middle East and the UAE.
For a corporate paying between Asia and the Middle East, what is the single thing that's still broken in cross-border payments today?
The main issue is certainty. The CFO doesn't really lie awake at night over a few basis points or correspondent banks in the middle. The issue is that when a payment is initiated, it's left in a chain — there is no certainty the payment will reach the beneficiary, and no certainty about how long it will take to settle. The lack of certainty in the current banking infrastructure is the core problem for corporate payments.
You're pioneering a concept at Hex Trust called convert-to-pay. What does that actually mean for a treasurer using Hong Kong dollars, dirhams, or dollar stablecoins?
In a nutshell, it completely bypasses the current chain of correspondent banks. Think of it this way — you're the treasurer of a company, you have a supplier in the UAE, you're using a Hong Kong dollar stablecoin, and you transfer it instantaneously. It settles in the UAE in an AED-denominated stablecoin in a matter of seconds. Compare that to the days and lack of certainty we currently have in legacy banking infrastructure.
Why is the UAE becoming such a key endpoint for on-chain B2B payments?
The main reason is that the region — and the UAE specifically — had the interest and the vision to move faster than other jurisdictions and clarify regulation across the whole ecosystem. That is critical. Without the right regulation in place and a regulator actively updating the rules as the space evolves, institutions won't enter the space. No rules, no institutions, no real business. The UAE has been exceptionally good at this.
Finally, atomic settlement — if that really takes off, what does the payments landscape look like in two years?
What we've largely solved for today is blockchain payments — transferring US dollar stablecoins atomically and quickly around the world. But there are still two things missing. First, the adoption of local currency stablecoins is still very low — new regulations are being introduced across different regions, but we're not there yet. Second, we only have currency on-chain. Tokenised securities — equities, fixed income — are coming to blockchain, but it will still take a couple of years. Fast forward two years and we'll have different currencies and different assets, meaning payments won't just be atomically settled in dollars but in multiple currencies and used to buy and sell different instruments. That's the future.
Alessio, great insights into the movement of money. Thank you very much for joining us today.
Thanks.
