One of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, Huobi, has made a ‘significant investment’ in OpenFinance Network (OFN), a trading exchange for tokenized securities.

OpenFinance Network provides liquidity for digital assets. Its client roster includes banks, brokerage houses, custodians, and transfer agents serving the alternative markets. The US-compliant startup has recently announced partnerships with a list of prominent players in the blockchain industries as it seeks to capture a portion of a huge market class that is waiting to be tokenized.

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The partnership purpose is also to provide Huobi with exposure to new markets as it continues its expansion overseas. Huobi’s expansion comes as cryptocurrency adoption accelerates in the West, following significant growth in the United Kingdom and Europe.

Despite regulatory uncertainty, the firm also attempts to make inroads into Canada and US with plans to open offices in Toronto and San Francisco.

After China cracked down on cryptocurrency exchanges and ICOs late last year, the company has shifted most of its ‎business operations to Huobi.pro, which is headquartered in Singapore. It also expanded globally and now has offices in South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong.

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Huobi handled nearly $912 million of virtual currency trades during the past 24 ‎hours, making it the world’s third most active fee-charging crypto exchange, ‎according to Coinmarketcap.com, which aggregates trading statistics reported by ‎exchanges. ‎

Seems a lucrative market

OpenFinance offers a platform that manages the entire lifecycle of blockchain based digital assets, including origination, issuance, exchange, settlement, and redemption. The site claims it will enable all operations in a regulatory compliant manner.

The move also comes just as the US Securities and Exchange ‎‎Commission is seeking legitimate platforms serving as ‎trading venues ‎for digital assets. ‎

This topic has received much attention since the SEC ‎made clear that any digital token with an income stream is ‎a security, and furthermore that ‎any entity wants to ‎become an ATS needs to register with the SEC as a ‎broker-dealer and become a member of a self-regulating ‎organization, such as the ‎FINRA.‎

Will Wang, Huobi’s Head of Business Development and Investment for North America, commented: “Huobi Eco has always been committed to providing support and solutions for Huobi to operate within the compliant requirements of every country in which we do business. This is even more important as our market matures. We are looking forward to collaborating with OpenFinance and applying blockchain technology to revolutionize the financial technology market.”