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Huobi is a global cryptocurrency exchange that specializes in Asian markets alongside Binance, OKEX, and MEXC. It was founded in 2013 by and includes a growing ecosystem, including Huobi University and Huobi Investment. Starting in China, Li is a serial entrepreneur in the field of financial technologies and was previously an engineer at Oracle. Du Jun has a career with Tencent prior to co-founding HUOBI GLOBAL in 2013. Jun left the company in 2017 to found his own companies in Golden Finance and Node Capital. After successful ventures with both of those companies, he returned to Huobi Global in 2020. Huobi was acquired by About Capital in Hong Kong in Q3 2022 for $3 billion, making it one of the largest M&A deals in cryptocurrency history.
Products and Services
Huobi represents a global cryptocurrency ecosystem that offers users deep liquidity and a large number of cryptocurrencies. BTC/USDT and ETH/USDT trading pairs represent the highest liquid trading pairs on the exchange. In total, Huobi offers consumers more than 400 listed cryptocurrencies on its platform and is continuously expanding this number as new coins get approved.
Traders on the platform can expect a 0.2% base fee to execute transactions. Additionally, Huobi does offer traders the opportunity to receive a discount on trading fees via holding the native Huobi token (HT). Fees are also broken down into two separate categories: General Tiered Fee Structure and Professional Trader Tiered Fee Structure.
For futures trading, Huobi offers traders 192 different trading pairs. With a high amount of trading pairs, Huobi manages to routinely clock over $1 billion in daily trading volume. Notably, Huobi’s perpetual trading markets typically crush that of futures. This remains true with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, Cardano, and others.
Bitget Overview
The Bitget exchange launched officially in 2018 with a later derivatives market launch in June of 2019. The exchange is led by Sandra Lou (CEO), Intae Song (CSO), Grace Chen (Managing Director), Yvonne Tee (CMO), Leslie Chen (COO), and Kenneth Tan (COO). Bitget holds regulatory operating licenses in Canada, Australia, and the United States. However, research suggests that the Australia license has since been removed from its website. A 2021 version of the Bitget website reveals that there was once a license for operating in Singapore as well, but it has since disappeared.
As far as security is concerned, there is no existing information showing that Bitget has ever experienced a hack or attack on its exchange. Thus, as of Q4 2022, it can be speculated that the exchange is deploying the best practices in terms of security and consumer protections. Users have the ability to activate multiple different authentication methods with which to protect funds. Additionally, Bitget has received 12 A+ ratings from SSL Labs and shows it is backed by security companies like Suntwin Technology, Armors, HEAP, and others.
Bitget maintains an emergency insurance reserve of $200 million that consists of BTC and USDT. This reserve is referred to as the Bitget Protection Fund. Users are generally considered to be protected by the fund. So, when a user results in a loss that is not a consequence of their own actions, Bitget is expected to reimburse the user via the fund. This promotes higher consumer confidence in utilizing the exchange.
Bitget’s primary controversy came when Singapore removed its operating license. This happened after the exchange launched a new K-pop digital currency called Army Coin which created a clash with the K-pop band it was named after. The exchange denied any formal connections to the K-pop band.
Operationally, in addition to the US, Canada, and Australia, Bitget offers services in Europe, Korea, Japan, LATAM, India, South East Asia, and Africa. There are a handful of restricted countries on the exchange, such as China and Hong Kong. Prospective customers must prove that they are not from an area on an international sanctions list to utilize the platform.
Bitget is primarily tailored to retail customers but does offer some institutional services. In August 2022, Bitget announced a partnership with XTRD to accelerate services and adoption of Bitget amongst institutional clients. With this partnership, Bitget can extend services to trading firms, hedge funds, and market makers. XTRD offers a healthy range of trading solutions to institutional investors, including FIX API for digital asset trading, real-time normalized market data feed, and low-latency execution services. For usage, the exchange serves an estimated 1 million users in more than 40 countries. With this user base, Bitget Futures is listed as top five exchange based on trading volume according to CoinGecko data.
Products and Services
Bitget has no official direct fiat currency on-ramps. To utilize the exchange’s services, uses must deposit their own cryptocurrencies. Bitget offers users the ability to participate in spot trading, futures trading (including perpetual futures settled in USDT, USDC, and other cryptocurrencies), bot trading, copy trading, and launchpad. Bitget boasts approximately 400 tokens and 450 different trading pairs, making it much smaller than that of FTX or Binance. The futures market has 107 total trading pairs for perpetuals.
The exchange does have its own native token called BGB. The BGB token has an unconfirmed circulating supply but a maximum supply of ~2 billion tokens. The spot market on Bitget offers users the ability to trade without fees. Futures contracts come with a 0.02% Maker trading fee and a 0.06% Taker trading fee. The top three futures pairs are BTC-USDT perpetual, ETH-USDT perpetual, and APT-USDT perpetual.
MEXC Overview
The MEXC exchange was established in 2018 with an initial focus on Asian markets. The exchange is run by CEO John Chen. Chen graduated from National University of Singapore with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and holds a Master’s from Nanyang Technological University. Chen is considered a serial entrepreneur as he has founded multiple companies including Accufind Technologies in 2013 and eBeeCare in 2015. After eBeeCare was acquired, Chen eventually started MEXC in 2018.
The exchange has thus maintained a positive reputation within its industry and even won the “Best Cryptocurrency Exchange in Asia'' award in October 2021. With no security violations, the exchange is operating with a clean track record. There are some reports from users of contentious behavior due to allegations of excessive trade volume. This includes Bitcoin talk forum reports from alleged users who have discussed complaints about the platform. The main accusation of MEXC wrongdoing stems from reported volumes of a particular asset with little to no price movement on the actual exchange itself. However, these are accusations and tend to be older from when the exchange was known as MXC.
According to the MEXC website, the exchange operates in 170 countries across the globe, though its main market has been Asia with a particular niche in China. The project has received numerous official licenses, including from the United States, Canada, Switzerland, and Australia. The exchange offered API services and verification channels to institutions, though (like other exchanges within this report) seems to be more tailored to retail customers.
Products and Services
The MEXC exchange offers both spot and margin trading as well as perpetuals futures trading settled in USDT or other cryptocurrencies. Additionally, users can take advantage of leveraged ETF’s, copy trading, staking, launchpad, and bot trading. The MEXC exchange offers an impressive 1,559 tokens and 2,159 different trading pairs available on the spot exchange. MEXC also has 249 trading pairs for perpetual contracts.
MEXC has its own native exchange token called the MX token. The estimated circulating supply is ~100 million tokens with no listed maximum supply or fully diluted value. The market cap for the MX token is estimated to be approximately $106.8 million. Holders of the MX token have the right to participate and vote on business decisions, team elections, and even gain priority in activities on the exchange. MX token holders can execute transactions on the exchange at 60% of the normal trading fees with the remaining 40% of trading fees being used to repurchase and burn native MX tokens. Spot trading on MEXC comes with fixed 0.2% trading fees for both Makers and Takers. The top three futures pairs on MEXC are BTC-USDT, ETH-USDT, and DOGE-USDT.
