Huobi Global ambitious new project, Huobi Chain, aims to build a public Blockchain that Huobi Global will eventually migrate its current digital asset exchanges, Huobi Pro and HADAX, onto the public chain. The goal according to Leon Li, Founder & CEO of Huobi Group is “for Huobi Global to run on the public Blockchain and become a truly decentralized autonomous organization”. Huobi Chain will be open-sourced and the project kickstarts by seeking a global leader to lead the development of the Huobi Chain project. Here is where it gets interesting.

Huobi Global new project — Huobi Chain

Vote for the Global Leader and Receive Airdrops Today

The vote for who is going to lead the Huobi Chain project is autonomous and democratized. Users who have more than 100HT may vote here. There will be three rounds of voting, and each round users who vote will receive airdrops.

There are currently 148 candidates, with a clear breakaway group that has stormed ahead with the vote counts. 25 candidates have more than a million votes at the time of writing. Click here to view the candidates and details of their work experience and Blockchain-related authorship.

Front Running Candidate: Steve Melnikoff, CTO of Penta

Steve Melnikoff, CTO of Penta, Huobi Chain candidate

In the breakaway pack of candidates with more than 1 million votes, stands Steve Melnikoff, the CTO of Penta and the Chief Scientist of Penta Global Foundation. Before his forays into Blockchain, Steve Melnikoff was an Honorary Visiting Fellow in Physics in the University of Melbourne.

Steve Melnikoff’s experience in Penta will be relevant to being the global leader for the Huobi Chain project. Penta is a public Blockchain that has a unique consensus mechanism where it uses Dynamic Stake Consensus for mining new blocks. Penta, under the guidance of Steve Melnikoff, has also introduced sharding technology to improve Penta throughput.

There can only be one winner though, and right now he stands behind Liu Wei, Director of 360 Innovation. Steve Melnikoff is almost a million votes behind Liu Wei at time of writing.

Will Dark Horses Upend the Race?

There are many notable Blockchain leaders in the running that candidacy has seemed to not gather steam, yet. The founders of ArcBlock, TAC, Ruffchain, Bither, Trustnote, AICHAIN, bubi, Andromeda, PCHAIN and many other Blockchain projects have all thrown their hats in the ring. Surely one of them would have the popularity backing to burst through and join the ranks of the front running pack.

Roy Li — Ruffchain CEO, the Dark Horse of the Race

Roy Li Ruffchain — candidate for Huobi Chain Superhero Program

Sitting out of the front pack of candidates is Roy Li, Founder & CEO of Ruffchain. Ruffchain is an open source Blockchain for Internet of Things (IoT) decentralized application development. It has an open main chain and an ecosystem that allows for asset management and securitization, assets ownership and rights transfer, and open data device-device transactions.

Roy Li is well respected by his peers. He was voted as “Most Influential CEO in Blockchain for 2018” by People Capital, 31QU and BlockData during the 2018 Global Blockchain Technological Development Conference.

Under Roy Li’s guidance, Ruffchain has aspired to be a developer-friendly Blockchain. Roy Li compared Blockchain development to phones operating systems. According to Roy Li, when he was working in Nokia, it had 70% market share of the mobile phones used at one point. Nokia’s demise was the Symbian operating system that was not developer-friendly, and was overtaken by other mobile phone operating systems such as Android and Apple OS. The same can be said for Blockchain. Ethereum is largely successful because developers can easily develop applications on it with minimal research and a low barrier to entry in the application development learning curve. He intends to make Ruffchain similar in developer’s learning curve to increase applications and adoption of Ruffchain.

Vote to Participate in Huobi Chain Development

The mechanics of Huobi Chain development is definitely novel. It is a financially sound project, with 30 million Huobi Tokens (HT) put aside by Huobi Global for the project, with an equivalent value of more than USD$100 million at point of writing. It is democratized in that the leader of the project will be voted in by people who own HT. The candidates who have thrown their hats in the ring are respected, established members of the Blockchain community. It remains to be seen how the Huobi Chain will work out. All eyes remain on the vote for the global leader of Huobi Chain for now.