Huobi DeFi Labs Launches Global Alliance to Expand the Decentralized Financial Ecosystem with Cross-Border Collaboration

LONDON, August, 17th, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Huobi DeFi Labs, Huobi Group's newly-formed decentralized finance (DeFi) division, today announced the launch of the Global DeFi Alliance, an international consortium of centralized and decentralized financial service providers and platforms. The alliance was initially joined by Huobi in conjunction with the Maker Foundation, Compound, NEST communities, and dYdX to jointly advance DeFi research and development, promote best practices, and facilitate cross-border collaboration and ecosystem development between East and West.

The launch of the Global DeFi Alliance comes amid a spike in DeFi interest from investors and financial institutions—both traditional and digital—and marks an underlying shift in the financial sector as potential collaborations between centralized and decentralized organizations present promise a myriad of new opportunities in DeFi and beyond. 

"DeFi is the first attempt in human history to build a modern financial system without credit risk, and it is unleashing the power of free economy at a global scale," said Huobi's Chief Investment Officer Sharlyn Wu. "However, there are still many gaps that need to be filled, from theoretical research and technological development to ecosystem development. Not only are centralized financial institutions still far removed from crypto-native communities, but there's also a divide between Asian and Western DeFi communities."

Through extensive cooperation both internally and with other key stakeholders, the new alliance aims to become the first to bridge centralized and decentralized financial communities, as well as unite the fragmented DeFi communities across the Asia-Pacific and Western regions.

The first batch of alliance members includes five of the top teams in crypto and DeFi, including the Maker Foundation, a software development contributor to the Maker Protocol, an Ethereum-based platform where users can self-generate Dai, the most used decentralized stablecoin in Defi; Compound, the largest decentralized lending protocol globally; NEST Protocol, the first decentralized price oracle network that uses decentralized incentive mechanism to provide verified prices on the chain; dYdX, the largest decentralized margin and derivatives exchange;; Huobi DeFi Lab, a subsidiary of the world's leading digital asset financial service provider.

"Defi enables a frictionless financial ecosystem that benefits users by providing more access and more opportunity," said Rune Christensen, co-founder of MakerDAO  and CEO of the Maker Foundation. "Cooperating across the industry to share insights and learn from each other should help the space grow smarter, faster and more sustainably."

"DeFi is an opportunity to create fair, efficient, transparent, safe, and globally accessible financial markets," said Robert Leshner, founder of the Compound protocol. "By sharing standards & best practices, we can help the industry build products ready for mainstream adoption."

To help accelerate the development and adoption of DeFi at global scale, the alliance will focus its efforts on several key areas:

1. Education. Develop educational content and assets to further improve investor education on the topics of DeFi and cryptocurrencies.
2. Research & Development. Promote technological innovation in DeFi through joint research and theoretical development.
3. Standardization. Develop standardized protocol interactions for current and future DeFi projects.
4. Security. Share knowledge collaborate on security protocols to improve DeFi security.
5. Adoption. Jointly promote and build awareness to drive mass adoption of DeFi protocols.
6. Sustainability. Accelerate DeFi ecosystem's prosperity and sustainability.
7. Growth. Provide support and resources to necessary for emerging DeFi projects and startups to grow.
8. Collaboration. Drive increase collaboration by promoting cross-border communications between DeFi projects, institutions, and other stakeholders.

In the coming months, the founding members of the Global DeFi Alliance plan to admit additional DeFi and CeFi members, including but not limited to wallets, protocols, research institutions, investment institutions, security companies, trading firms, traditional financial institutions, and more.

The alliance was first spearheaded by Huobi DeFi Lab under the guidance of Huobi CIO Sharlyn Wu, who previously oversaw blockchain strategy and investment at China Merchant Bank International (CMBI). The alliance is the first of many planned initiatives of Huobi DeFi Labs, which was only recently established to focus on DeFi research, investment, incubation, and ecosystem development for Huobi Group.

Wu added, "We hope to transform the traditional financial landscape by combining cutting-edge forces in the industry, looking for the best use cases, and jointly promoting DeFi to become more accessible, for the vision of creating next-generation financial systems to benefit billions of people around the world."

About Huobi Group

Huobi Global is the world's leading blockchain and cryptocurrency infrastructure provider with a financial product suite that includes the largest digital asset exchange by liquidity and real-trading volume. Trusted by users over 170 countries, the Huobi platform is dedicated to improving the freedom of money for users, and features an unmatched portfolio of crypto products and offerings, including: trading and finance, cryptocurrency finance infrastructure solutions, education, data and research, social welfare, investment and incubation, and many more.

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SOURCE Huobi DeFi Labs