Popular cryptocurrency exchange Huobi, in partnership with Chinese blockchain startup Nervos has announced its plans to launch a public blockchain specifically targeted at decentralized finance (DeFi) service providers.
The blockchain, dubbed Huobi Finance Chain is targeting enterprises, financial institutions, and exchanges seeking to create custom blockchains and tokenize their assets.
Huobi is following the lead of counter Maltese-based cryptocurrency exchange Binance that launched its public blockchain recently dubbed Binance Chain.
A press release published on Monday July 1st stated that the project “will be a regulator-friendly, high-performance financial blockchain” which will serve several purposes amongst which include “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.”
The Singapore-based exchange announced that it is targeting the 2nd quarter of 2020 as the launch date of the blockchain while the launch of the testnet is scheduled for the 1st quarter of the same year.
According to the announcement, the project will be launching an open-source repository this quarter. As with most financial solutions, the project will incorporate regulatory friendly features such as a decentralized identifier (DID), Know Your Customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) procedures.
“We believe this project has enormous potential to do for established and emerging financial products and services what cryptocurrency is doing for the world of money,” said Livio Weng, CEO of Huobi Global and Vice President of Huobi Group. “One of our core missions has always been bringing the power of blockchain to the public and we think something like this has the potential to benefit millions of people globally. We’re extremely excited to be working with the Nervos team on this.”
Huobi Group founder and CEO Leon Lin is excited about the next phase of finance which according to him will largely be dominated by decentralized financial companies and his company is positioning itself to play a major role in this sector.
Huobi has been in business since 2013 and over the years has built a strong ecosystem of businesses surrounding the blockchain industry. Its most successful is the exchange business.
“This project is not only in line with Huobi’s overall strategy, but it also fulfills our core mission,” Lin said adding that “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.”
