The Road to Globalization: Huobi’s Journey and Contribution to the Crypto Space
China’s clampdown on crypto last year massively disrupted the global crypto scene, leaving native crypto trading platforms with no choice but to expand outside of China’s borders. Huobi Global is no exception – the company took the initiative early on to stretch its reach beyond simple trading of digital assets to other aspects of the blockchain ecosystem, such as blockchain accelerators and setting up operations in regions such as North America and Europe and obtaining compliance licenses in several locales such as the United States, South Korea and Gibraltar.
End December 2021 saw Huobi retire all its Mainland China-based accounts, marking its complete exit from the China market and signaling the company’s intention to expand globally. Already an established brand name in the crypto space, Huobi has commanded considerable influence in the industry, particularly with the launch of products and activities aimed at welcoming users to the exciting world of crypto. These offerings, labeled Primelist and Candydrop, which allowed users early access into highly-sought after crypto assets, have proven a crowd favorite and gained significant market recognition.
The exit from the mainland Chinese market may have cost Huobi some 30% of its revenue, revealed Du Jun, co-founder of Huobi, in an interview earlier this year, but this loss has not dampened the popularity of the products featured under its Prime-series events.
Launched end last year, PrimeEarn, a financial management platform promising users high APYs for depositing mainstream digital assets, has proven so popular that products are sold out within mere minutes from time of launch.
1. A leader in the digital asset deposit space
Investors have tended to favor depositing their crypto assets with exchanges, since the early days; particularly mainstream assets (BTC, ETH, USDT, etc). Although the overall gains achieved from depositing such assets with exchanges could be lower than that of investment plans offered by DeFi networks, users have opted to subscribe to the deposit plans offered by exchanges as they provide stable, guaranteed returns versus letting funds sit idle.
The gains obtained from depositing such digital assets in fixed deposit plans are provided by the trading platforms themselves, and APYs offered usually tend to be on the low, and not visibly attractive side. In addition, platforms usually set an individual cap for the amount that can be deposited, further limiting the income an individual user can gain from subscribing to such deposit products.
As an innovative financial deposit product launched by Huobi, PrimeEarn allows users to deposit mainstream assets such as BTC, ETH, USDT and HUSD for the highest annualized returns available in the market today. Since the PrimeEarn series was first launched in December last year, products have sold out in record time — for example, the latest PrimeEarn High-Yield Tuesday event saw BTC deposit products sold out in just 52 seconds, with HUSD, USDT and ETH deposit products snapped up within 3 minutes.
In contrast, competing deposit products offered by most popular crypto exchanges are hardly as attractive. Most competitors offer APYs no higher than 7% for mainstream assets — APYs offered for USDT deposits typically range between 3% – 7%, while APYs offered for BTC deposits range from 0.66% to 1%. ETH deposits usually bring in APYs of 1%-5%, in comparison to the 5%-40% offered by PrimeEarn.
Taking Binance Earn as an example. Binance Earn adopts a tiered APY model, so when the deposit amount increases, the actual APY enjoyed by users gets lower and lower. While PrimeEarn sets no such condition, making it more friendly with users with large funds. With no tiered APY, investors truly enjoy income as advertised.
Starting16:00 on April 19, users can subscribe to flexible deposit products to win 5% APY rate hike coupons, which can then be used in next week’s High-Yield Tuesday event to obtain APY up to 45% for USDT deposits. The rake hike coupons will be delivered to the top three users based their daily average deposit amount over the last three days (from 16:00 on April 19 to 16:00 on April 26, UTC).
2. Huobi’s impact on its competitors
Binance and Huobi have long been in competition with each other. In the early days, Binance launched its platform token BNB in order to seize market share, and Huobi followed up with the launch of its platform token HT. After Binance restarted its Launchpad in 2019, Huobi launched Prime to match — both platforms are often neck-in-neck with each other. In June 2018, Huobi first proposed the concept of an exchange public chain, Binance then officially launched its exchange public chain BSC in April 2020.
Binance leads the industry in terms of trading volume and therefore has no real need to attract users by offering high APYs for its deposit products. The APYs that Binance offers for fixed deposit products has always been maintained at a relatively low level by industry standards, at around 7%.
Given such circumstances, Huobi took the initiative to launch the “High APY” financial management product PrimeEarn, which has triggered positive responses in the market, especially for traders with deep pockets who favor the huge and stable benefits brought by PrimeEarn.
With Huobi PrimeEarn, investors stand to gain up to 40% APY for staking mainstream crypto assets such as BTC, ETH and USDT for 14 days, with no cap on amount deposited, making it an attractive option for investors holding onto large amounts of assets.
The 40% APY offered for USDT deposits is the highest in the market today, while the 35% APY offered for ETH deposits is also one of the highest available, deeming PrimeEarn an attractive proposal in today’s competitive marketplace.
The attractive APYs offered by PrimeEarn have not gone unnoticed and have instead prompted action from other exchanges. Given the precedence set by Huobi, Binance and many other platforms have subsequently increased the APY level of its financial management products to meet the market needs.
In response to the average APY offered by Huobi PrimeEarn USDT products, Binance has also increased the APY enjoyed by its USDT current products in 0-2000 USDT tier from 7% to 10%, and tiered APY follows for any subsequent sums deposited. The APY for the amount exceeding the first 75,000 USDT can dip as low as 1%.
In essence, the competition to offer the market’s highest APYs between Huobi and Binance in the financial management space can only mean good news for customers holding onto large amounts of digital assets.
3. Huobi’s Global Roadmap
From its humble trading platform roots, Huobi has since extended its reach and built an ecosystem that integrates multiple businesses. Huobi recently built a virtual identity system, enabling users to register a decentralized identifier (DID) , with which they can use to participate in promotional activities on the Huobi platform to obtain sought-after digital assets. The DID identity system has not only served as a bridge for Huobi users to access the Web3 world, but is also expected to form part of the foundation for Huobi as its users traverse the vast metaverse of the future.
Huobi’s financial business worldwide spans many aspects of the blockchain space, from digital asset trading, financial management, investment and asset management, with customers hailing from more than 140 countries across five continents.
The Huobi brand has been gaining prominence worldwide since its withdrawal from the Mainland Chinese market, a clear signal that its globalization dreams have come to fruition. At present, the company’s Twitter followers exceed 1 million and the company is well-known to crypto investors across the world.
As one of the earliest compliant exchanges, Huobi has obtained financial licenses in the United States, South Korea, Japan, Gibraltar, Hong Kong and other regions.
Being the first in the industry to launch High-Yield PrimeEarn products has granted Huobi competitive advantage in the crypto financial management field. But the benefits to users do not stop there — Huobi fully intends to leverage its position as an crypto industry leader to launch more innovative products in the very near future to further advance the industry’s progress and development worldwide.
