$HTX breaks away from the shackles of platform coins and opens up new ideas for exchange governance

In 2017, Binance created a new asset class with BNB: exchange platform coins. Today, platform coins have almost become standard in major mainstream exchanges and have evolved into an important track in the crypto ecosystem. Relying on the exchanges behind them, these platform coins are designed to provide users with practical value such as transaction fee discounts and IEO participation qualifications. Most of the exchange coins on the market currently, although they may have slightly different functions, do not have any significant essential differences from each other; and $HTX, which just celebrated its first birthday not long ago, is bringing new ideas to the industry.

In fact, it is not correct to call $HTX a platform coin. Although it has the same name as Huobi HTX, and although it has some functions similar to platform coins on Huobi HTX, including fee reductions, etc., in essence, $HTX is a native governance token issued by HTX DAO, which is a decentralized autonomous organization completely independent of Huobi HTX. Any $HTX holder can participate in the governance of HTX DAO, including proposing proposals, voting, etc., to decide how the ecosystem develops.

HTX DAO was established in early 2024 with the aim of building a more transparent, efficient and open digital economic ecosystem. Since the establishment of HTX DAO, Huobi HTX has become its ecosystem builder, providing liquidity, application scenarios and other support for $HTX. According to the official white paper of HTX DAO, the "H" in $HTX stands for Huobi HTX Exchange, in recognition of the latter's outstanding contribution to the ecosystem. In return, Huobi HTX hopes to realize a grand long-term vision through HTX DAO: to govern centralized exchanges in a decentralized manner.

Recently, the well-known blockchain industry media CoinDesk wrote an article explaining the innovation of $HTX, pointing out that the difference between $HTX and traditional platform coins lies in the underlying architecture. The latter is issued by the exchange and has a controlling and controlled relationship with the exchange; Huobi HTX is not the issuer of $HTX and therefore has no right to control $HTX. If $HTX is only viewed as the platform currency of Huobi HTX, its greatest use will be overlooked: participating in the governance of HTX DAO.

As part of the entire HTX DAO ecosystem, Huobi HTX is also governed by $HTX holders. $HTX holders can express their opinions on any aspect of Huobi HTX's functions, products, decisions, etc. in the DAO forum, and the proposals put forward are expected to be implemented on the platform. At the same time, in order to encourage more users to hold $HTX and participate in the governance of HTX DAO, Huobi HTX has granted $HTX a large number of rights and interests, including transaction fee discounts similar to traditional platform coins, as well as participation in signature activities such as Launchpool.

Launchpool was launched in December last year, allowing users to obtain dual benefits of financial management and mining by purchasing $HTX coin-earning products, killing two birds with one stone, which greatly empowers $HTX. In fact, this activity was born out of the governance proposal on HTX DAO and was eventually successfully launched.

HTX DAO is still relatively young, and Huobi HTX still has a long way to go to fully realize decentralized governance, but the emergence of high-quality proposals represented by Launchpool has already demonstrated the potential of the DAO governance exchange model. In addition, proposals such as optimizing the voting process for listing Huobi HTX have also sparked heated discussions on the HTX DAO governance forum. In the future, as more and more users join HTX DAO and inspire more groundbreaking ideas, the decentralization process of Huobi HTX will continue to advance, and the vision of "People's Exchange" will eventually be realized; on the other hand, $HTX will also gain more empowerment and its value will continue to increase. Therefore, it can be said that $HTX has broken away from the framework of platform coins, and its upper limit will be much higher than traditional platform coins. Just one year after its launch, $HTX has been listed on 28 exchanges. Once its potential is more fully understood, it will only be a matter of time before it is listed on more exchanges. As CoinDesk wrote, “The benefits offered by different exchange coins vary, but $HTX integrates the full range of: ”Community empowerment and decentralized governance; ”Staking assets generate income; ”Token destruction mechanism maintains value; ”Holder-exclusive rights and privileges.” ”If Binance’s BNB represented the first wave of exchange coins, then the second wave launched by $HTX — CoinDesk said — “provides unprecedented governance functions and opportunities to influence the exchange ecosystem.”