Silence Laboratories Appoints Hadley Stern as Head of Institutions

Former Fidelity Digital Assets Founder joins to expand institutional adoption of cryptographic infrastructure that banks can deploy and operate on-premises

PALO ALTO, CA, UNITED STATES, October 15, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Silence Laboratories, a provider of quantum-safe cryptographic infrastructure for digital asset security and privacy-preserving computation, today announced the appointment of Hadley Stern as Head of Institutions. Stern will lead the company’s collaborations with banks, custodians and other financial institutions adopting Silence Laboratories' technology, with a focus on helping institutions retain direct control over the systems securing their digital assets.

Stern brings experience building digital asset businesses at some of the world’s largest financial institutions. He helped found Fidelity Digital Asset Services, one of the first and most established players in the digital assets space, and served as Global Head of Digital Asset Custody at BNY Mellon, where he helped launch the bank’s custody platform for bitcoin and ether. He has also led the Innovation Lab at Amazon Web Services and held leadership roles at Bloq and Marinade. His appointment builds on his previous role as a board advisor to Silence Laboratories.

“Building custody solutions from within major institutions taught me that institutions need full control over the technology securing their customers’ assets,” said Stern. “Silence Laboratories is one of the few teams pairing world-class cryptography with software institutions can run themselves. It’s a compelling pitch to banks, and something they’ll need to scale their digital asset businesses.”

Silence Laboratories’ Silent Shard technology uses multiparty computation, or MPC, to distribute signing authority across separate key shares, allowing transactions to be signed without assembling a complete private key. Institutions can deploy the software within their own infrastructure and manage key generation, storage and signing under their own security policies. This gives them control over critical custody operations without relying on Silence Laboratories’ servers to process transactions.

BitGo already uses Silent Shard libraries across its hot and cold custody wallets. Its deployment keeps key material, key generation and signing operations outside Silence Laboratories’ infrastructure, demonstrating how the company’s cryptography can support custody services operated by institutional customers.

“Hadley deeply understands how institutional digital asset providers operate,” said Dr. Jay Prakash, Co-Founder and CEO of Silence Laboratories. “He understands how key infrastructure decisions are made—who needs to sign off, and what security and operational requirements technology has to meet. His experience will help us work more closely with institutions as they deploy our infrastructure.”

Silence Laboratories is also developing post-quantum MPC infrastructure to help institutions prepare for advances in quantum computing that could eventually compromise widely used digital signatures. Earlier this year, Silence Laboratories and BitGo completed a post-quantum transaction simulation demonstrating how quantum-resistant signing can be incorporated into an institutional wallet workflow while preserving distributed key control, policy enforcement and separation of duties.



About Silence Laboratories

Silence Laboratories builds quantum-safe, MPC-based infrastructure for distributed key management and privacy-preserving compute. The company's products secure digital asset infrastructure for banks (including G-SIBs) and global institutional custody platforms.

Silence Laboratories’ products include Silent Shard for MPC-based key management, Silent Compute for privacy-preserving analytics, and post-quantum MPC infrastructure for institutional custody. The company is also developing AP3, an open-source agent-to-agent communications protocol designed to keep sensitive information private.

Learn more at https://silencelaboratories.com/

Zack Shapiro
Angle42