Huobi approved by the FSA in Japan: it can now offer crypto derivatives

Huobi Japan has received approval to offer and operate as a Type I Financial Instrument Business directly from the Japanese regulator Financial Service Agency (or FSA). The crypto-exchange can now offer and manage crypto derivatives.

Huobi Japan: the crypto exchange is a Financial Instrument Business 

Huobi reportedly joins the only 7 crypto-exchanges in Japan, out of a total of 34, that have the same Financial Instrument Business licence. 

The company can now develop derivative products as well as offer trading and market-making services for its clients. 

Huobi’s CEO, Japan Haiteng Chen, commented on the news as follows:

“We’re very excited to have reached this milestone. It will enable us to expand business beyond spot trading and fuel the next phase of our growth in Japan. Going forward, we plan to develop a number of crypto derivatives products to meet the growing demands of the market”.

The FSA is the main regulator for financial services in Japan, overseeing the areas of banking, securities and exchange and insurance.

Huobi Japan and the development of the entire ecosystem

The Huobi ecosystem has seen the crypto-exchange develop different strategies over time to have a presence across the globe.

Huobi Japan is a centralized crypto-exchange part of this ecosystem and, according to CoinGecko’s data, offers 13 coins, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Huobi Token (HT) and 35 trading pairs. 

The success of the eighth crypto exchange under the spot category and second for the derivatives category also depends on the latest strategies. 

In September 2021, the Asian exchange had announced an airdrop for all its European customers, relating to the crypto Shiba Inu, the “Dogecoin Killer”. In total, the crypto-exchange’s gift of coins amounted to 1.3 billion SHIB tokens. 

In the same month, Huobi Ventures announced a $10 million fund to invest in GameFi, blockchain-based gaming that also leverages NFTs and “Play to Earn” mechanisms. 

The fund would be used to support developers to propose their own games, so as to participate in the project selection. The start-ups, which are financed by the GameFi fund, would have received support from Huobi in terms of marketing, legal assistance and the introduction of strategic partners. 

The entry into DeFi and the numbers of Huobi Token

It was March 2020 when Huobi Group announced the launch of its open-source public blockchain for DeFi, the Huobi Chain. 

Using a flexible governance model based on a variant of Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), the Huobi Chain is part of the Virtual Machine circuit, i.e. those supporting the creation of financial applications for DeFi, dApps. 

Meanwhile, the Huobi Token (HT), born as a crypto-exchange currency, was launched in January 2018 as an ERC20 token, i.e. based on the Ethereum standard.

With the expansion of the Huobi ecosystem, HT has seen a price pump since the beginning of 2021, starting at $5 and reaching its ATH – All-Time High of almost $35 around May 2021, the period of the first bull run of the queen crypto Bitcoin (BTC). 

As of today, the price of HT is $7.60 with a total market capitalization exceeding $1 billion.