Hong Kong Stock Exchange-listed Huobi Technology Holdings today announced that it will be launching Huobi Lending, a cryptocurrency lending service for institutions and high net worth individuals (HNWI) through its new digital asset brokerage platform Huobi Brokerage, according to a company announcement.
Fast facts
- Alongside growing institutional interest in digital assets, crypto lending services leveraging cryptocurrencies as collateral for liquidity and investment return have been gaining traction. Huobi Brokerage’s over-the-counter crypto-lending service will enable customers to use their crypto assets as collateral for their cryptocurrency purchases. According to Huobi Tech, the loans are flexible depending on customer needs and can range from three months to two years for loan terms and US$10,000 to US$100 million for loan amounts. At launch, the loans will carry an 8.8% fixed-term APR.
- Huobi Brokerage’s launch and its new Huobi Lending business line comes as Huobi Tech seeks to expand its crypto services for institutions and HNWIs. “Huobi Brokerage is one of our most important business lines for crypto asset financial services,” said Huobi Tech CFO Lily Zhang in a statement. We will improve our existing businesses and gradually introduce more services to cater to our customers’ demands as the industry continues to evolve. We believe that developing new crypto asset financial services under Huobi Tech can supplement our brokerage business.”
- Earlier this year, Huobi Asset Management, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Huobi Tech, which holds the Type 4 (advising on securities) and Type 9 (asset management) licenses by the Securities and Futures Commission in Hong Kong, launched digital assets fund products — Bitcoin Tracker Fund, Ethereum Tracker Fund Multi-Asset Fund, Active multi-strategy virtual asset Fund and Crypto Mining Private Equity Fund — to provide institutional investors with exposure to cryptocurrencies and the crypto mining sector.
- Huobi Tech shares the same shareholders as Huobi Group, with Li Lin as the ultimate beneficiary owner, but operates independently of Huobi Group and the Huobi Global cryptocurrency exchange.
- Amid China’s crypto crackdown, Huobi Global, which operates one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, has had to wind down its crypto business for users in mainland China. The Huobi Global exchange has also announced that it will stop serving Singapore-based customers from March 31, 2022 in compliance with Singapore law and that a new, separate, Singapore platform will be launched by end-2021. Huobi Global holds a distributed ledger technology license in Gibraltar and in November announced that it had received approval from the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission to migrate spot trading services to its regulated entity in the country.