Huobi Group is to launch the Huobi Chain Superhero Championship, a 21-month program for the global developer community aimed at building from the ground up the company’s latest initiative, a public blockchain project called Huobi Chain.
The initiative aims to develop a “next-generation decentralized autonomous financial platform” that would provide individuals and organizations with a trustworthy and autonomous platform for value exchange, fundraising, securitization, and more. Once the platform is finished, Huobi said it will gradually migrate operations onto the new blockchain.
“We firmly believe in a decentralized future and the main goal of the Huobi Chain project is to transform a centralized corporation to a decentralized one that’s run by the community,” said Lin Li, founder, and CEO of Huobi Group. “Our dream is for Huobi to run on the public blockchain and become a truly decentralized autonomous organization.”
The Huobi Chain Superhero Championship will first start by seeking out a global leader to lead the development of the Huobi Chain project. The program will be divided into ten milestones, each with a prize pool. New teams will be able to join in at any milestone based on the open sourced code from previous milestones.
“Upon completion, all of the code will be open sourced,” Li explained. “Going forward, a percentage of Huobi’s yearly revenue will also be made available to fund the program.”
Huobi Group will fund the program with an initial investment of 30 million Huobi Token (HT), which is a little over US$170 million at the current exchange rate.
Founded in 2013, Huobi Group is a Chinese firm operating several subsidiaries and brands focusing on the cryptocurrency and blockchain space. These include Huobi Capital, Huobi Labs, Huobi Global Eco Fund, Huobi Academy of Blockchain Application, Huobi Augmented Blockchain, and Huobi Mining Pool. The group’s subsidiary Huobi.pro operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform serving more than five million users in over 130 countries.
Charlie Tsai, chief strategy officer of Huobi Group, said: “Huobi has been glorious over the past five years since its establishment in 2013 – from a Bitcoin trading-based website to the world’s leading digital asset financial service provider; from a small Chinese team of dozens of people to the Huobi Group that spans across five continents and employs thousands of people.”
The launch of the Huobi Chain project comes at the time when the company is looking to expand to new markets including the US and Europe. It already registered its US-based operation earlier this year and is now looking to open a new office in London.