Huobi launches brokerage platform, targets institutional investors

By Robert Stevens

Singapore-based crypto exchange Huobi today launched a new crypto brokerage platform, Huobi Brokerage, at the annual Davos forum in Switzerland. The new service is marketed toward institutional clients and “high-net-worth individuals,” the likes of whom they’ll surely find at Davos, a conference attended by heads of state, titans of industry, and, er, climate change-activist Greta Thunberg. 

It’s the first product from Huobi’s “Global Institutional Business” division, which launched last November. 

Thunberg probably won’t take to it—chances are she’s still working out what to do with the $1 million TRON CEO Justin Sun’s promised to give her—but Huobi is hoping that its new platform will interest institutional clients, who’ll get access to the new platform’s premium services, such as zero transaction fees, superior trading algorithms, over-the-counter liquidity, real-time trade quotes and instant price locks. Huobi will also work with other exchanges and OTC desks to get its customers the most competitive prices it can find.

“Institutional investors and HNWIs will be the major contributors of growth for the crypto economy in 2020 and beyond, but barriers like low liquidity and a lack of asset enhancement products are stalling widespread adoption,” said Ciara Sun, Vice President of Global Business at Huobi Group, in a statement.

Perhaps Sun’s got a point, and Huobi’s right to go for big businesses. When the Chicago Mercantile Exchange launched its Bitcoin futures contracts service last year, it mustered $1.7 billion in trading in a single day. 

As well as courting big business, Huobi is also trying to get governments on board. In November, Huobi made its code for its own blockchain, Huobi Chain, open-source. Huobi Chain comes with regulator-friendly features, such as “supervisory nodes,” which regulators can access to cancel transactions or kick users off of the system. 

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