Main Takeaway:

• Binance Asia Services announced its post-money stake of 18% in Hg Exchange

• HGX is Southeast Asia’s first member-driven private securities exchange, founded by leading financial institutions PhillipCapital, PrimePartners, and Fundnel, and powered by Zilliqa’s high-performance blockchain

• HGX was granted a Recognised Market Operator license by the Monetary Authority of Singapore earlier this year

Binance Asia Services, the blockchain ecosystem and cryptocurrency provider behind Binance. sg, today announced its post-money stake of 18% in Hg Exchange (HGX), subject to regulatory requirements. 

HGX is Southeast Asia’s first member-driven private securities exchange, founded by leading financial institutions PhillipCapital, PrimePartners, and Fundnel, and powered by Zilliqa’s high-performance blockchain. Earlier this year, HGX was granted a Recognised Market Operator license by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. In addition to shares in private companies, HGX is working to list alternative assets including wines, art and real estate.

“Crypto and traditional financial offerings continue to converge. Through this investment, we seek to work with HGX in enhancing offerings of products and services supported by blockchain technology,” said Richard Teng, CEO of Binance Singapore. “We aim to work collaboratively with HGX to enhance the blockchain ecosystem in Singapore.”

Binance Asia Services continues to drive collaboration with local partners, government agencies and talent, to support the sustainable growth of the blockchain ecosystem globally. 

Mr Teng added: “In Singapore, we continue to work closely with key government agencies to support the growth of the blockchain ecosystem and development of requisite local talent needed.”

About Binance Singapore

Binance.SG is a fiat-to-cryptocurrency platform designed to meet the needs of Singapore users who buy and sell cryptocurrencies with Singapore Dollars (SGD). The platform offers real-time, 24/7 SGD deposit and withdrawal functionality, along with a critical focus on security and regulatory compliance. Binance Singapore offers the lowest trading, deposit, and withdrawal fees in the Singapore market, further lowering the barriers to entry while encouraging local crypto adoption.  

Binance Labs, the venture capital arm and innovation incubator of Binance, made a strategic investment in Aptos Labs, a Layer 1 blockchain built by some of the original creators, researchers, designers, and builders of the Diem blockchain, to accelerate adoption of the decentralized ecosystem.

Aptos and Binance will work closely together in growing the Aptos ecosystem through development, code review, infrastructure building, hackathons and much more – all to come soon!

As a new, independent project focused on delivering the safest and most scalable Layer 1 blockchain for everybody, Aptos is adding more builders and supporters of the team with the newly secured fund.

One of the values that Binance Labs sees in its future portfolio companies is ‘how can this project change the industry’ and ‘the number of people who will use the product when it is launched’. “In that perspective, Aptos can contribute to bringing 100 million users to the crypto space with the mission to create universal and fair access to decentralized assets for billions of people”, said Jeffrey Ma, Investment Director at Binance Labs. He added, “We also believe in the expertise that the Aptos Labs team has developed through building the Diem project.”

Bill Qian, Head of Binance Labs, said “We believe in the same vision that Aptos sees - building a more reliable and scalable blockchain for everybody. Eventually, the blockchain that can be used by the masses will be able to drive mass adoption of users in a wide variety of applications and accelerate technological and business innovation in those fields. Users can expect a secure and seamless experience of blockchains.”

The project has recently raised $200 million in a strategic round led by a16z crypto with the participation of Multicoin Capital, Katie Haun, 3 Arrows Capital, ParaFi Capital, IRONGREY, Hashed, Variant, Tiger Global, BlockTower, FTX Ventures, Paxos, Coinbase Ventures, and more.