In the trend of exchange tokens, Huobi Global exchange joined in when they launched their Huobi Token (HT) in January 2018. Going into 2020 we began to see the price of exchange tokens back on the rise with Huobi being ranked #17 by market cap at the time of this writing.
Starting the Flame
In Chinese, Huo means "popular, hot, starting a fire". and Bi means "coins" or "currencies". Therefore Huobi means "popular coin" or "hot coin".
With the success of Binance of their BNB token, Huobi got in on the action launching their utility token for its exchange to offer benefits like discounts on trading fees and such. However, that was only part of the reason as Huobi was originally based in China and when the Chinese government began its crackdown on crypto and exchanges, Huobi saw it's trading volume drop by 95% between September to November 2017. It was later then decided to launch the Huobi token as a part of an overall strategy to recover the userbase it lost during the regulatory crackdown. The success of Binance's BNB and exchange tokens, Huobi was able to breathe new life to their platform and continue to compete in the market.
Having a max supply of 500 million, 300 million of it was distributed to its pro users who purchased it at a discounted price package.
Some of the benefits of holding HT include:
- Early access to events and airdrops
- Voting
- Discount on trading fees
- Liquidity protection
- Trading pairs with popular coins
Part of the early access to airdrops was the launch of their Huobi Pool Token (HPT) for HT holders to receive daily dividends.
Feeding the Flame
Huobi launched its launchpad platform Huobi Prime in March of 2019 and the first project was chosen was the TOP network. While the Binance launchpad works on Initial Exchange Offerings (IEOs) and relies on an exchange or exchanges top raise funds, Huobi Prime differs and uses its own Huobi token and doesn't serve as a platform for crowdfunding.
Huobi has since been growing its ecosystem since and even just announced the launch of a localized exchange in Thailand.
The Huobi blockchain ecosystem layout includes:
Global Business
Trading platform
- Huobi Global
- Huobi OTC
- Huobi Japan and other regions
Cloud
- Blockchain cloud solutions for various regions such as Indonesia, Russia, Argentina, and Thailand.
Huobi China
- Huobi Research Institute
- Huobi University
- Huobi Labs
- Industry Empowerment Center
Ecological
- Huobi Mining Pool
- Huobi Chat
- Huobi Wallet
- Huobi News
- Huobi Capital
- Huobi Global Ecosystem
- And more
Visit HuobiGroup for more details.
One of the bigger news on Huobi's growth is the launch of the public beta of their own HuobiChain that is focused on Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and work towards migrating their tokens from Ethereum over to their new chain once the mainnet goes live and continue to have HT the main utility token for the Huobi ecosystem. The mainnet launch date has yet to be announced.
The open-source project comes with a new consensus algorithm known as Overlord that was developed by Huobi's partner, The Nervos Foundation.
The new consensus algorithm aims to help make Huobi's blockchain infrastructure more efficient. The Nervos development team looked into the more recent consensus algorithms such as practical Byzantine Faul-Tolerant (pBFT), Tendermint, Hotstuff, and found that those algorithms did not meet their specific needs.
In testing, we found that Overlord can support hundreds of consensus nodes and thousands of transactions per second. In addition, the transaction delay is no more than a few seconds and transactions cannot be rolled back on the chain.
How Overlord Works
First off, some may be wondering why the consensus name is called "Overlord". It happens to originate from the game Starcraft where an Overlord controls swarms of the Zerg population. Relating the swarm of Zerg to nodes, the Overlord is the brain of the swarm and is the consensus that controls the functions of all the nodes.
Overlord uses BLS aggregate signatures to collect consensus votes and no longer broadcasts consensus messages to other nodes on the network. It will send the consensus message to the leader that will process and distribute the message out to other nodes. "Overlord adopts a “timeout + brake” mechanism to address the issue of malicious leaders." This greatly reduces bandwidth usage and further improves efficiency.
Block verification along with the voting process happens in parallel with Overlord which makes it process transactions much faster at larger capacities.
Apparently, the most important feature of Overlord is the execution of the consensus process being able to run in parallel as well. The transaction ordering and state consensus are decoupled to allow for faster confirmations, "once a block has been accepted into the chain, it can be considered confirmed and any transactions in that block cannot be rolled back."
We believe that through the utilization of Overlord consensus, we can build a highly performant and widely distributed blockchain system, and Overlord will become a common consensus solution for the next generation of high performance blockchains.
-Nervos Network Blog
You can read their Huobi Chain's documentation or Nervos's blog for more technical details.
As Huobi gears up to launch the mainnet of their Huobi Chain, the competition has been up and down as HT was the #2 exchange token for a while up until last month in February 2020 where OKB overtook HT and drop to #3. We will have to see over time how the new Overlord consensus works and whether or not the crypto community will utilize it. Or perhaps it will take over the blockchain and be the Overlord of swarms of blockchains... Only time will tell.
As always, this is not investment advice. Always do your own research.
