Huobi Opens Office in Russia,Russian Language Website

Huobi, one of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, has opened an office in Russia, according to Bitnovosti.

Russian connection

The move was announced at a St Petersburg conference this week.

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The office is scheduled to open its doors on the 12th of November, in tandem with a Russian language website. It will offer online support and a call centre, and will host a blockchain project support centre for local startups.

The latter service will be offered in tandem with the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, among other education institutions.

The move follows Huobi joining the VEB Innovation Fund, an initiative that has developed startups in Russia since 2011, on the 19th of September.

A busy year

Huobi is currently the third most popular cryptocurrency exchange in the world, transacting $521.7 million in trading over the last 24 hours according to coinmarketcap.com. The exchange was founded in China, but after its home government banned cryptocurrency exchanges it opened offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, London, Japan and San Francisco. Most recently, it opened up in Dubai.

It began trading only Bitcoin, but started to expand the options in May 2017.

In April 2018, it began campaigning to become a block producer on the EOS blockchain. EOS, like Ethereum, is a base for people to design smart contracts, but it relies on a small number of nodes to verify all its blocks. These nodes are elected, and once in position they make a lot of money and have control over governance decisions. In October, a leaked document suggested that Huobi was accepting bribes to make certain decisions – an accusation that the exchange denied.

In June, the exchange announced the initiation of a competition to design a decentralised blockchain, to which it intends to migrate when ready.