A brief history
Huobi is a Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange created in 2013 by former Oracle engineer Leon Li. Originally based in China, the Huobi Foundation expanded to Singapore, South Korea, and Japan following China’s 2017 Bitcoin trade ban and maintains a strong presence in the Asian markets. The Huobi exchange is renowned for the sheer number of cryptocurrency trading pairs available - nearly 400 as of 2022. Huobi also seeks to protect its users through regular buybacks of HT. HT tokens that the exchange buys are sent to an investor protection fund. The purpose of the fund is to compensate for any financial losses that traders and investors experience due to bad actors, system failure, and alike. Additionally, these buybacks which remove HT from circulation also help to increase the scarcity of the token which may positively affect the price.
HT in practice
Huobi Token comes with several benefits that make it quite a useful asset within Huobi Global’s ecosystem. First, holders of HT benefit from reduced transaction fees, and the exchange offers an entire series of discounts for clients that hold VIP status. Second, if you own any amount of HT, you are eligible to vote on various proposals regarding the project’s future development. This ensures true decentralization and democracy within the ecosystem, and the more tokens you have in your possession, the more weight your vote carries. Lastly, holding HT provides great convenience when it comes to converting coins on the Huobi platform which has HT paired against pretty much all other cryptocurrencies listed on its service. This means that it is very easy and convenient to exchange Huobi Token for other cryptocurrencies. Thus, rather than buying stablecoins or Bitcoin to purchase a less popular cryptocurrency, HT grants access to most, if not all of them.