Huobi Becomes First Major Exchange to Run a Chainlink Node

Major cryptocurrency exchange Huobi will integrate their price data with Chainlink’s ecosystem in an effort to improve its own data integrity and provide more accurate price information.

While Binance was the first major exchange to provide their data to Chainlink oracles in October 2019, Huobi has gone one step further by running its own node on the system through Huobi Wallet. This allows the exchange to sign its own price data allowing users to confirm that any exchange data coming from the Huobi Node is authentic and direct from the source.

Huobi Wallet CEO Will Huang stated:

“DeFi offers a unique value proposition of providing financial products that are transparent, open, and programmable. We are very excited to accelerate our involvement in this emerging trend by providing Chainlink users access to Huobi Global exchange data, as well as running our own Chainlink Node.”

The first batch of price pairs will include BTC/ETH, BTC/USDT, ETH/USDT, and LINK/ETH, with more to follow.

Improving market integrity

Huobi appears to be on a mission to improve its credibility following concerns around volume inflation last year. By running a node, the exchange’s reputation will be on the line should any of the data shared through Chainlink prove to be inaccurate.

As one of Gibraltar’s largest crypto firms, the integration comes in the wake of the country’s continued efforts in reducing market manipulation by crypto firms over the last few months. Last year Huobi partnered with Global Digital Finance (GDF), co-chairing the Market Integrity Working Group with Solidus Labs.

Concern over market manipulation

In 2019 a Bitwise report implied that Huobi was reporting inflated trading volume, causing an internal investigation to weed out any potential wash trading strategies by market makers. 

Huobi Global CEO Livio Weng admitted wash trading may have occurred:

“We did identify a few of our market makers conducting what we suspect may have been wash trading for the sake of performance and marketing purposes. We have already communicated with these market makers and they have discontinued the strategies in question.”

Huobi has since moved to the top 10 exchanges in Messari’s ‘Real Volume’ list.