Huobi is announcing the launch of the Huobi Chain Project (HCP) and the Huobi Chain Superhero Championship Program (HCSCP). With the HCP and HCSCP initiatives, Huobi wants to build a next-generation, decentralized financial platform.

Huobi, headquartered in Singapore, is a global digital currency trading platform and exchange with offices in Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and the United States. According to the company, Huobi’s digital asset exchange has accumulated a trading volume of $1 trillion and serves more than 5 million users in over 130 countries.

According to data provided by CoinMarketCap, Huobi is currently the world’s third largest crypto exchange by trade volume, trading about $1.2 billion a day at the time of writing. The Huobi group is pursuing a diversified strategy, as shown by the recent launch of a crypto-oriented Exchange Traded Fund (ETF).

“Huobi is moving to Huobi Chain for a couple of reasons,” Gordon Chen, a senior Huobi executive in charge of the project, said in conversation with Bitcoin Magazine. “First, we believe in the decentralized future where some form of autonomous organization will replace corporations today. Huobi wants to make history and lead this transition. We see this as a grand experiment. Second, we think that this new world needs a new financial infrastructure, which is what we are hoping Huobi Chain will be.”

Huobi wants to develop the HCP into a decentralized, autonomous platform for value exchange, fundraising, securitization and more. Once the project is completed, Huobi plans to gradually migrate its operations onto the Huobi Chain. Huobi claims that the HCP is the first global experiment of its kind to transform a centralized corporation to a decentralized organization.

“Our dream is for Huobi to run on the public blockchain and become a truly decentralized autonomous organization,” Huobi Founder and CEO Leon Li stated in a press release.

HCSCP Competition

Huobi is launching the HCSCP competition, divided in ten milestones, with prizes to incentivize the community to participate in building the Huobi public chain and selecting a partner to lead the HCP. The company will fund the project with an initial investment of 20 million Huobi Tokens (HT), which is equivalent to about $100 million at the current exchange rate.

“Upon completion, all of the code will be open-sourced and we will also gradually migrate Huobi onto this new public blockchain,” Li explained. “Going forward, a percentage of Huobi’s yearly revenue will also be made available to fund the program.”

According to information provided by Huobi to Bitcoin Magazine, the HCSCP will follow a 21-month long program structure. The program will start by seeking out a global leader to lead the development efforts of the Huobi Chain Project. The Huobi Chain Project will then be divided into 10 milestones, each with a large prize pool; each milestone is a contest between teams from different parts of the world. New teams can join the contest at any milestone based on the open-sourced code from previous milestones. Upon completion, all of the code will be open-sourced, and the winning teams will share the prize.