Huobi Group recently announced that Huobi Chain, a high-performance public blockchain being developed in partnership with Nervos, is now open source and publicly available to the entire developer community. Blockchain developers, partners, enterprises, and regulators can at any time access the code on Github, track the project’s progress, and openly contribute to the development of Huobi Chain.

As the first regulator-friendly financial blockchain, Huobi Chain aims to enable enterprises, financial institutions, and exchanges to deploy their own blockchains, tokenized assets, and decentralized financial (DeFi) services. Huobi Chain was first announced in July 2019 as a joint project between Huobi Group and Nervos, a technical blockchain partner whose team has contributed to top blockchain projects like Ethereum, Sparkpool, and imToken.

Open Source Ideology

The development of Huobi Chain is still underway, but the move to open source the code during the early stages of development highlights Huobi’s commitment to building a truly decentralized network from the ground up.

“Since the start of this project, our goal was to create an inclusive ecosystem where all stakeholders from developers to regulators can collaborate and leverage the full potential of blockchain technology,” said Leon Li, founder and CEO of Huobi Group. “In sticking to that vision, we’re now opening the code and inviting the greater blockchain community to help us shape and build the future of decentralized finance.”

Architected by Nervos, Huobi Chain’s decentralized infrastructure is based on deep customization of open source components such as Muta, CKB-VM, Overlord, and nervos-p2p. Once completed, Huobi’s high-performance public blockchain will be optimized for a wide range of financial services and applications, including lending services, debit services, stablecoins, security token offerings (STOs), decentralized exchanges (DEXs), real-world payment services, and more. Huobi Chain will also offer multi-asset support, smart contract capabilities, and multi-and-sidechain architectures to provide enterprises with a highly flexible and scalable framework.

“Innovation is not possible without collaboration, which is why Nervos operates on open source principles,” said Kevin Wang, co-founder of Nervos. “Decentralized finance is an emerging field with massive untapped opportunity, so the participation from the developer community will play a crucial role in not only pushing Huobi Chain forward but also the entire industry.”

Regulatory Framework

One of the key differentiators of Huobi Chain is its regulator-friendly design. Huobi Chain is the first financial public chain to support regulatory nodes that let regulators contribute to the network as validators. The chain will also support decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and implement identity protocols such as Know Your Customer (KYC) verification to meet Anti-Money Laundering (AML) requirements.

Li added, “If major banks and financial institutions are to fully embrace and adopt permissionless blockchain technology, we need to create a safe and secure environment that makes it easier for them to transition their products and services to the blockchain. By ensuring full regulatory compliance, Huobi Chain is well-positioned to become a top financial blockchain, further strengthening Huobi Group’s position as the global leader in the blockchain industry.”

As previously outlined, the Huobi Finance Chain testnet launch is expected in Q1 2020—and the mainnet launch in Q2 2020. To access the Huobi Finance Chain code repository, visit https://github.com/HuobiGroup/huobi-chain