Huobi Global in partnership with Zerohub conducted a meetup on cryptocurrency in Kyiv. This was the first event of Huobi in Ukraine. The participants of the event were the narrow circle of the most respected representatives of the industry. The chamber atmosphere and deep immersion of the participants in the subject made it possible to make the meeting productive and full of insights. We would like to share the most interesting moment of the meeting with those who couldn’t participate in it.

New Huobi OTC Service

Huobi Exchange announced a new service for OTC markets at the meetup. This is a new functional tool for institutional investors and wealthy private ones.

Among the problems of OTC markets is the lack of platforms for large trade. Channels for buying and selling cryptocurrency for big customers are almost absent. The regulation in this area is at a rudimentary level.

A new project in this area was presented by Vladislav Kurinnoy. It is called Huobi OTC Desk or Huobi OTC trading service that solves business problems and provides fixed prices and no fees for operations with cryptocurrency. All main cryptocurrencies, as well as dollars, euros, British pounds, will be available to users. The minimum amount of trading is limited to $100 thousand. Customers are able to quickly and anonymously buy and sell cryptocurrency in the necessary amount, without intermediaries and at the appropriate market price. The new service distinguishes from its competitors by the availability of license. Huobi OTC Desk is licensed by the DLT-licensed Gibraltar.

Daniel Berlion, Chief Operating Officer in Zerohub comments:

“In my opinion, Huobi Global is one of the leaders of the crypto industry which is still very young. For Zerohub, it is an honor to hold the first official HG event in Kyiv. I can say that Huobi has established itself as a stable and reliable service, so the opening of the OTC desk for me personally was not a surprise. These guys are one of the few in the world who have real and deep liquidity, which is a key point in this business. Therefore, I have no doubt that most of the large deals will pass through their service most of the times in the nearest future. We are always ready to help in the technical aspect, and for us, as developers, it is important to have such close contacts with market leaders in order for our product to meet the high standards set by our friends from Huobi as well.”

Security of Wallets

Sam Krivosheev, CTO Zerohub, raised such an important topic as the security of crypto wallet exchanges. The specificity of a crypto exchange business requires information about the number of funds at users’ disposal in order to provide them with trading opportunities. For this, the exchange keeps users’ funds in a cryptocurrency in their own wallets. But how to guarantee their safety?

“To protect clients’ accounts from hacking and stealing funds, exchanges use such methods of protection as two-factor authentication and private keys for accessing the API. However, when hacked, these methods can protect only from several types of attacks. Wallet architecture also plays an important role in security. MVP wallets have a number of advantages, they can be easily deployed and have a ready-made interface. However, this is not the best option in terms of security since the private key is stored in the node, so hacking a single server will allow attackers to withdraw all the assets. In addition, the solution is not sharpened for mass use, if there are many accounts, such a wallet begins to fail.”

According to Sam, wallets with Sharding architecture are also not the most suitable solution for the exchange, although it is quite convenient to use them. To withdraw a significant part of the funds, it is still enough to connect to one server only. There is a similar situation with the architecture of the Wallet. Signature Service offers more secure exchange wallets. This is a very safe solution, the only downsides are the complexity of deployment and development. Sam refers to the multisignment vs Rats multi-signature format as the safest architectures. In this case, we can say that the funds of the exchange are protected well.

Sam Krivosheev, also notes that the key to the security of the exchange is not the architecture of the wallets but its software infrastructure as a whole. If the exchange is made hastily and has many vulnerabilities, the question of hacking is only a matter of time. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the exchange comprehensively, as a single infrastructure and make a decision about its safety only when based on complete information.

Well-established support service

Jeffrey Smith, CIO Zerohub, brought the subject of correct debugging of customer support service up. Jeffrey has been providing customer support since 2005. According to him, there are several main goals for any communication with the user: to solve the client's problem, to protect the company from fraud, and to protect the company from the theft of funds. Communication can be both active and passive. Passive communication is used for insignificant events. These are news and innovations that will not affect the users of the platform. Therefore, this information is published in the blog and social networks of the company. However, in the case of major events that will affect clients, customer support service must be as active as possible. For example, customer support service should provide direct communication in the case with announcing new rules for authentication or trade, changes in commissions. In this case, direct accent communication is needed even if it holds not the most positive sense. Silence and restriction of information in this situation is harmful. Inform your customers even about the most negative event. So you will bring benefits to the client and many users will be thankful.

The quality of support reflects the speed of response and the convenience of communication channels: “For communications with the crypto community, companies other than their own media should use sites such as Reddit, Medium, as well as Telegram and Twitter communities. They show the greatest efficiency in 2019. The most important qualities of support service are conciseness, politeness, accuracy, and convenience for users. The main problems of communications are false answers and messages overloaded with superfluous information.”

According to Jeffrey, the effective message should be properly formatted and easy to read. It is also important to provide clear instructions for action in the message. The user must understand what he must do if he or she is required to take any action. This should not be a streamlined message but a specific and understandable instruction.

‍

The problems of the industry, which the participants raised in their speeches during the meetup, prove that the crypto industry is becoming more mature. The stock exchanges and exchange software are evolving. Its participants pay more attention to customer convenience and security, as well as regulatory issues. This confirms the high importance of such industry events.