Huobi Group, a leading global blockchain services provider, has partneredwith layered blockchain network Nervos to develop a new public blockchain focused on decentralized financial (DeFi) services.
The project, provisionally named Huobi Finance Chain, will be a regulator-friendly, high-performance financial blockchain that allows enterprises, financial institutions, and exchanges to deploy their own blockchains, tokenized assets, and DeFi services. Among other applications, the project will have the potential to host lending services, debit services, stablecoins, security token offerings (STOs) and other means of asset issuance, decentralized exchanges (DEXs), real-world payment services, and more.
Nervos is providing the technology for the new blockchain platform, which will be launched in partnership with Huobi as part of a joint initiative to accelerate the future of decentralized finance. The project is expected to open source in Q3 this year, testnet launch in Q1 2020, and mainnet launch in Q2 2020.
“The mission of Huobi Group is to make finance more efficient and make wealth accessible to all,” said Leon Li, CEO and Founder of Huobi Group. “This project is not only in line with Huobi’s overall strategy, but it also fulfils our core mission. From a strategic point of view, decentralized financial services are still in an early stage of development. The market demand is clear, however, and we believe this is a very definite business opportunity. During the past six years, Huobi has accumulated a lot of experience in the field of cryptocurrency trading, which has given us advantages in terms of understanding blockchains, accumulating key technology, and understanding asset transactions and financial markets. Although Huobi is currently a leader in the cryptocurrency industry, this industry is likely to undergo far-reaching changes in the future. Exploring public chain technologies and business models both keeps us innovative and serves as a strategic defence.”
By providing the decentralized framework and infrastructure for institutions and enterprises to build on, Huobi and Nervos are aiming to make financial services more transparent, inclusive, and efficient. The joint project is to be open source and will provide multi-asset support and smart contract capabilities to enable third-party developers to build and deploy a wide range of DeFi services. The platform will also support multi and side chain architectures to provide a flexible and globally scalable blockchain infrastructure for financial institutions and enterprises.
The project will support decentralized identifier (DID) and implement identity protocols such as Know Your Customer (KYC) verification to meet Anti-Money Laundering (AML) requirements and ensure full regulatory compliance. Regulators will also be able to join Huobi Chain and contribute to the network as validators. “Our vision is to build the infrastructure for the future decentralized economy, so we’re thrilled to partner with Huobi to bring our technology to the financial sector,” said Kevin Wang, co-founder of Nervos. “More and more assets are being tokenized and moved to the digital world, including both native cryptocurrencies and traditional physical assets. The financial industry is now at an inflection point, and together with Huobi, we’re well positioned to help it modernize its services for the decentralized future.”
