HTX, Huobi’s next “ten-year commitment”?

Ten years is a fairly long time scale for the crypto industry, which often jokes that "one day in the crypto industry is like one year in the real world."

But for Huobi, it means the expiration of the first "ten-year agreement": from its inception in 2013, to becoming the exchange with the largest market share in the Chinese market in 2017, and then to its complete withdrawal from the domestic market in 2021, Huobi has witnessed the ups and downs of the global, especially Chinese, encryption industry in the past decade, and has also experienced its own glory and loneliness.

Now that another decade has begun, how will Huobi start its next "Ten-Year Agreement"?

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In mathematics, X is often used as the unknown in an algebraic expression, with infinite possibilities.

Just as Musk loves X, he added the X element to many of his companies, such as xAI and SpaceX, and even Twitter was directly renamed "X".

Huobi, which changed hands nearly a year ago, also took advantage of the time window of its tenth anniversary to announce a new brand strategy plan, adding the "X" element to "Huobi", officially upgrading to "Huobi HTX", and shouting out the slogan "Digital Assets on Huobi" (HTX, Just Trade It):

On the one hand, judging by the single letters, H continues the ten-year heritage of Huobi, T means the determination to go all in on the TRON ecosystem, and X represents the core exchange business.

On the other hand, judging from the combination of letters, HT is the name of Huobi HTX platform currency, and with X, it can be understood as the exchange for trading HT - HT·X;

For a well-known old exchange in the industry, the brand is undoubtedly a valuable asset that has stood the test of time. So what are the considerations behind Huobi HTX's brand upgrade?

We all know that Huobi HTX has always been the "leader" in the Chinese market among cryptocurrency exchanges. However, with the changes in the overall environment, Huobi HTX's market share and competitiveness have dropped significantly after it withdrew from the mainland market. At the same time, external competition has increased sharply, which once caused Huobi HTX to lose focus in the new competition stage and fall into the front row of the "Big Three".

At the same time, different tracks and types of projects and companies in the crypto industry are changing with each passing day, constantly innovating and iterating. Tracks such as DeFi and Layer2 are gradually emerging, and the market is becoming more globalized and decentralized. In order to keep up with market development, Huobi HTX's transformation is imminent.

So combined with the big picture, from the integration of the two timelines, we may be able to find the answer:

In September 2013, Huobi HTX was officially established. In the past ten years, Huobi HTX has undergone tremendous changes, from occupying half of the global Bitcoin transactions to moving overseas;

In October 2022, Huobi HTX officially changed hands. Within a year, Huobi HTX experienced a series of major changes, including the joining of Justin Sun, major adjustments to its structure and personnel, and the application for a Hong Kong VASP license.

From this perspective, when the "ten-year agreement" collides with the "one-year run-in", it is only natural that Huobi HTX, which has already gotten rid of its survival problems after months of cost reduction and efficiency improvement, launched this brand upgrade strategy:

On the basis of completing the internal adjustments, we will follow the trend and re-start the long-term decision-making layout to find a new starting point for Huobi HTX to enter the next decade.

HTX——A New Journey of "Globalization"

Huobi HTX has always had a dream of "globalization" in its heart.

Now, with the launch of the brand upgrade strategy, Huobi HTX has once again picked up its "globalization" layout with the international brand name "HTX" as its entry point.

This "globalization" layout can be divided into two parallel battlefields: regional layout and product layout, in order to achieve global reshaping simultaneously.

Expanding global compliance landscape from point to surface

"Dominica" is just the beginning of Huobi HTX's global regional layout. Its essence is to achieve its own "decentralization". The core idea is to focus on key areas and layout potential regions, so as to achieve balanced growth in multiple countries and layout a global business map.

This means that Huobi HTX will no longer rely on the crypto market of a single country or region, but will continue to explore new "Dominica" and expand its business to more countries and regions with crypto potential, while establishing a localized user group and partner network to provide global digital asset trading services.

This requires both a keen sense of smell and the ability to react quickly. For example, Hong Kong is one of the "seed players". Just as the West cannot lose Jerusalem, today's crypto market and project owners cannot ignore the potential weight of Hong Kong.

In April this year, Justin Sun appeared in Hong Kong and delivered a speech at the Huobi Hong Kong Night event; at the end of May, Hong Kong’s first rating agency HKVAC was established, and Huobi HTX became its first member; on June 1, Hong Kong’s new licensing system came into effect, Huobi HTX actively applied for a Hong Kong VASP license, and launched HTX HK, which is open to registration for users in Hong Kong, all of which focus on Hong Kong’s compliance layout.

In addition to Hong Kong, Huobi HTX is also promoting compliance work in other regions, including the application for licenses and the establishment of compliance stations in Gibraltar, Lithuania, Dubai, BVI, Australia and other countries. In addition, the Huobi HTX Mars Project launched in June even set its sights on the vast space, intending to challenge the boundaries of cryptocurrency use.

"The story that blockchain technology has always told is to provide banking services to people in unbanked areas and those who lack financial infrastructure." Huobi HTX's layout covers Asia, Europe, Africa and even Oceania, which not only meets the strong demand for cryptocurrencies in emerging crypto market countries, but also is an important tool for Huobi HTX to compete for incremental markets and expand crypto financial services.

As the size and influence of the crypto market continue to expand, embracing regulation and maintaining compliance will become a crucial lifeline if the entire industry and exchange track want to develop steadily. This is also the reason why Huobi HTX is committed to balanced growth and building a global business presence.

Comprehensive and diverse, creating a "super application for the crypto industry"

Competition among exchanges has always been fierce, especially in today’s saturated state. If you want to truly attract and retain users, you need to find richer use cases beyond the simple “trading” center point.

Therefore, Huobi HTX is also in the process of reshaping its product portfolio. In addition to the "globalization" of its geographical layout, Huobi HTX also aims to keep up with the market and achieve "diversification" of its products and services.

Just as Musk sees "X" as "a super application", "HTX" may also carry the ambition of Huobi New Asset to create a "super application for the crypto industry".

This "crypto industry super application" is to introduce new high-quality assets in the field of cryptocurrency to the maximum extent possible, create a one-stop crypto asset trading service platform covering spot, derivatives, wealth management, asset management, etc., to help users better trade, discover and invest in high-quality crypto assets, and provide more professional services and richer products to global users.

Moreover, the core narrative style and competitive advantage of Huobi HTX is that it can resonate with TRON, a global public chain that carries tens of billions of stablecoins USDT and a large number of real users. It combines the three-pronged system of exchanges, public chains, and stablecoins to achieve the effect of "1+1>2".

This is the core business logic that other exchanges (such as Binance) are currently focusing on developing but have yet to build, especially connecting with physical assets that have real usage scenarios, further connecting global high-quality assets with exchange users to achieve a two-line connection.

For example, Huobi HTX strongly supports the TRON ecosystem RWA token stUSDT, and cooperates with Justlend DAO to provide stUSDT staking services, which is to introduce physical assets into the DeFi system, provide ordinary users with more diversified income channels, and bridge the gap between individual investors and institutional investment targets.

In terms of asset activity forms, Huobi HTX plans to continuously iterate star products such as PrimeVote and large-value current account wealth management, and launch new products such as Shark Fin and asset custody in cooperation with Fireblocks, to provide users with safe and diverse options for storing and appreciating encrypted assets.

In terms of immediate feedback on market hot spots, Huobi HTX is clearly making a comprehensive layout of new assets to tap into a more sustainable wealth effect for ordinary users:

On the one hand, we will deepen cooperation with the mainstream ecosystem, including but not limited to the public chain ecosystem, Layer2 ecosystem, Meme ecosystem, etc.

On the other hand, we continue to pay attention to emerging market trends and actively contact various high-quality project parties to ensure that new digital assets can be launched on Huobi HTX as soon as possible to meet users' spot and rich derivative product trading needs.

For example, during the Meme Coin craze in April this year, Huobi HTX was one of the exchanges that listed popular tokens such as PEPE and ArbDoge earlier, helping the then "lukewarm" market and setting off a wave of speculation. In addition, Huobi HTX has also reached strategic cooperation with many well-known global service providers, public chains, project parties, such as TradingView, Polygon, and UniSat Wallet, to jointly create a multi-level business ecosystem and promote the upgrade of user experience.

In addition, Huobi HTX's 10th anniversary event proposed a special action for the 10th anniversary of the Mars Project - lucky users will enjoy 3 gifts, including: space travel candidate, one round-trip private jet use, and a Tesla Model 3 refreshed version (equivalent to 20,000 USDT + 20,000 USDT contract experience money), trying to attract more users to pay attention and enter the crypto market with diverse gameplay and rewards.

As mentioned above, on the one hand, we focus on the mainstream ecology to ensure user trading needs; on the other hand, we focus on the innovative market to give users a wealth effect. This is not only an indispensable core service demand for crypto users in the current market environment, but also highly consistent with the vision of Huobi HTX after the brand upgrade to "enable eight billion people around the world to achieve financial freedom."

As exchanges enter the second half, where will they go?

"People always overestimate short-term impacts and ignore long-term trends." From Uniswap to Cryptokitties, every turn and change in the blockchain industry has basically laid the groundwork early on. Many of the "sharp corners" that seem insignificant at present may bring a subversive wave of change to the entire industry in the future.

Looking back at the exchange track, it has been nearly a year since FTX suddenly collapsed in early November 2022, and the entire crypto industry and exchange track have entered the "post-FTX era."

The most significant change is that leading platforms such as Binance, OKX, Huobi HTX and a number of small and medium-sized exchanges have successively launched proof of reserve assets, which has promoted the further development of exchange asset security. For example, Huobi HTX recently updated its Merkle tree proof of assets in September, and the specific reserve ratio has been maintained at an excess level of more than 100%.

According to the Crypto Exchange Trends and Prospects Report released by Boston Consulting Group (BCG), cryptocurrencies are still in the initial stages of the adoption curve, with the number of crypto users likely to reach 1 billion by 2030. It is expected that the top five exchanges will account for 65% to 75% of spot trading volume and 80% to 90% of derivatives trading volume in the future.

In short, in the foreseeable future, CEX will still be at the core of the crypto market, but as the exchange track enters the "post-FTX era", the trend of "one dominant player" has reached its peak, both from the perspective of objective development laws and risk diversification.

Therefore, as CEX expands in size, the "one super and many strong" structure may be the next wave of the industry's background, and the scope of competition between exchanges will undoubtedly expand.

Under this background, regulatory compliance and product innovation are destined to occupy an increasingly important position in the competition, just like the development process of Binance, which started with decline and then rose. Regulatory compliance and product innovation will be the most direct competitive advantage. Although this trend is not obvious yet, time will gradually magnify its impact.

"Although Zhou is an old country, its mission is to renew itself." This means that the old Huobi has entered its ten-year anniversary of its inheritance, and the new Huobi has been reorganizing for nearly a year. The two timelines are intertwined, and the boundaries between the old and the new are both blurred and clear:

With the international brand "HTX" as the clarion call, we will implement the strategic layout of "globalization", deeply promote the new journey of regulatory compliance and product innovation, and start the next "Ten-Year Agreement".