Huobi Group — whose Huobi cryptocurrency exchange is in the global top three by volume — has announced the launch of the Huobi Chain Project (HCP), along with a $100 million USD funding plan to build a next-generation, autonomous, decentralized exchange platform.
Huobi CEO: ‘We Firmly Believe in a Decentralized Future’
Huobi Group announced today the launch of the Huobi Chain Project, along with $100 million USD in funding to build “a next-generation self-regulating and decentralized financial platform.”
The Huobi Chain Project will provide individuals and organizations with a trustworthy and autonomous platform for value exchange, fundraising, securitization, and more. The goal of this project is to develop both private and public blockchains and to establish decentralized, peer-to-peer networks. The public blockchains will be completely open — so anyone can join and participate.
“We firmly believe in a decentralized future and the main goal of the Huobi Chain project is to transform a centralized corporation to a decentralized one that’s run by the community,” said Lin Li, founder, and CEO of Huobi Group.
Our dream is for Huobi to run on the public blockchain and become a truly decentralized autonomous organization.
The company will kickstart the HCP program by seeking out a global leader to lead the development of the project through its Huobi Chain Superhero Championship. Divided into 8 milestones, teams from around the world will be able to join and compete for the prize pool, which will initially be an investment of 20 million Huobi Token (HT) — or about $100 million USD at the current exchange rate.
New teams can join the contest at any milestone, based on the open-sourced code from previous milestones.
“Upon completion, all of the code will be open-sourced and we will also gradually migrate Huobi onto this new public blockchain,” Li explained. “Going forward, a percentage of Huobi’s yearly revenue will also be made available to fund the program.”
To find out more, Bitcoinist spoke with Gordon Chen, project director of the Huobi Eco team, which will be incubating the Huobi Chain Project.
‘Huobi Chain Will Be Regulatable by Design’
Bitcoinist: Why did you decide to pursue a decentralized exchange blockchain-based architecture and migrate from the conventional centralized exchange model?
Gordon Chen: Decentralized exchange is part of this, but it is not our only goal. What we are hoping to accomplish with Huobi Chain is to one day completely move Huobi Group’s various business operations onto the chain and become an autonomous organization that is governed by the community.
Bitcoinist: What kind of features can a decentralized exchange offer users, compared to a centralized exchange?
Gordon Chen: We believe blockchain will bring about a new world where these autonomous organizations will replace existing corporations. This new world will need a new financial infrastructure. This new financial infrastructure is what we are hoping Huobi Chain will become. We hope that once Huobi Chain launches, it would make value and ownership tokenization, exchanging and trading by anyone freely.
Bitcoinist: Would decentralized exchange users be subject to KYC regulation? Would there still be withdrawal limits?
Gordon Chen: I am not a legal expert, so I can’t answer this question. However, what I can say is that Huobi Chain will be regulatable by design.
Bitcoinist: Today, centralized exchanges are much faster and have more liquidity that decentralized exchanges like Bisq, for example. How do you plan to overcome these hurdles and improve user experience of the decentralized exchange
Gordon Chen: That’s exactly why we need to build Huobi Chain to be the next generation blockchain, and why we can’t run on existing projects like Ethereum and EOS. This will be both a financial and a technical innovation. It is an audacious project, but we believe we will succeed.
Bitcoinist: How will the Huobi decentralized autonomous organization be governed exactly? Will it be a democratic model based on Huobi token ownership?
Gordon Chen: Yes. It will be community governed based on Huobi Token ownership. Currently, we don’t know the details. We are launching the Huobi Chain Superhero Championship to select the best leader in the world to lead the Huobi Chain design and development. We’ll leave the details for this team to figure out.
Bitcoinist: Can you give us a hint of what kind of blockchain you’re considering for this project in terms of specs and consensus algorithm? Will it be proof of work or proof of stake for example? Who will be able to run the full nodes?
Gordon Chen: The truth is that I don’t know. We are running the Huobi Chain Superhero Championship, we hope the winning “superhero” will lead our developer community to design the best consensus algorithm that fits the need of this new financial protocol.
Bitcoinist: Could you specify what kind of milestones there will be in the Huobi Chain project? When could we expect this platform to go live?
Gordon Chen: Our program plans to take 18 months, divided into 4 stages and 8 milestones. Each milestone would have a large prize pool and the winning teams will share that prize pool. Our initial investment would be 20 million Huobi Token, approximately 100 million dollars in today’s value. We promise to make continuous investment to fund it.
Bitcoinist: You say you’ll “kickstart the program by seeking out a global leader to lead the development of the Huobi Chain project.” What do you mean by “global leader” in this case?
Gordon Chen: The basic idea is that we will launch The Huobi Chain Superhero Championship program along with the starting of the Huobi Chain project. Huobi is not building the chain ourselves, we will be finding a technical “superhero” to lead this project. First, we will form a board of directors with the best blockchain experts in the world, and we’ll elect this leader from candidates around the globe.
What do you think about Huobi’s plans to ambitions of migrating to a public blockchain? Share your thoughts below!
Images courtesy of Shutterstock.
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