Huobi’s new U.S. subsidiary slated to go live next month
Huobi is preparing to launch its new US subsidiary, which will offer custodian services for Huobi’s own US dollar-pegged stablecoin, HUSD.
Huobi Trust Co., based in Nevada, a subsidiary company from Huobi Tech, will be commissioned by the end of July. Huobi Tech is a Hong Kong-based public company acquired by Huobi founder Leon Lin in a reverse takeover in 2018.
The latest move comes six months after Huobi Trust was granted a trust license from the Nevada Financial Institutions Division, according to a filing by Huobi Tech with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December.
The new trust company will provide custody and compliance services to crypto firms that operate in the US market.
Stable Universal, a US-based stable coin issuer, partnered with Paxos to launch HUSD on the Huobi Global trading platform in July 2019.
“We’re going to go through the second week of July and make a gradual transition from Paxos’ to Huobi Trust,” Rebecca Hirst, chief financial officer of the trust company, told CoinDesk.
The company claimed that the market value of HUSD exceeded $ 1 billion on May 20 and had risen 560% since January. Stablecoin is supported by decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms such as Uniswap, Curve.fi, the Cream protocol and the Heco blockchain.
Huobi Trust is part of the exchange’s efforts to expand in the United States after HBUS, another legal entity affiliated with the Huobi Group, ceased operations in December 2019 due to regulatory issues.
The exchange, which is based in the African island nation of Seychelles, has since assessed various ways to re-enter the US market, including working with a licensed brokerage firm based in the US. The parent group said at the time that upon its return it would bring its businesses in the country more into compliance.
The launch of the US trust company also comes at a time when Chinese financial regulators are cracking down on crypto exchanges for trading and mining.
Huobi has suspended some of its trading services for new investors and adjusted its over-the-counter (OTC) trading activities in the interest of compliance and growth, the exchange said.