HECO Chain Announces January 2025 Closure, Users Urged to Redeem Assets

HECO Network, a decentralized blockchain platform built by Huobi, one of the largest crypto exchanges, will officially discontinue its services on January 15, ending its journey after four years of operations.

HECO Bridge suffered a $87 million hack last year.

Users holding HRC20 assets are urged to redeem their holdings before the network’s closure. The list of affected HRC20 assets includes HRC20ETH, HRC20TUSD, HRC20LINK, HRC20USDC, HRC20UNI, HRC20SHIB, HRC20HBTC, and HRC20USDT, as noted in a Nov. 24 statement.

Holders of these assets are advised to deposit their holdings to the designated address before January 10, 2025, in order to avoid potential losses. These deposited assets will then be converted into points, which will then be redeemed for a new token, HTX.

The Fall of HECO

The distribution of HTX will occur in 12 equal batches, starting on January 15, 2025. Users will need to provide their TRON network address during the redemption process to receive their allocated HTX.

Launched in December 2020, HECO aims to provide a low-cost, efficient environment for developers to build decentralized applications (dApps) and engage in decentralized finance (DeFi).

The blockchain has played an important role in the development of the Huobi ecosystem. At its peak in 2021, HECO Network’s total value locked reached approximately $3 billion.

However, the blockchain has struggled due to the prolonged market downturn and steady growth of its competitors.

Ethereum, Solana, Binance Smart Chain remain leading layer-1 blockchains. The arrival of newcomers like Avalanche and TRON also challenges the position of HECO. Not only that, HECO was also hit by a hack that prompted users to move to other platforms.

Hacks Kill Platforms

In November 2023, the HECO Bridge was exploited, leading to the theft of approximately $87 million in various cryptocurrencies. Hackers reportedly gained access to the bridge’s private key and stole various cryptocurrencies, including a large amount of Ether and Tether.

Alongside the HECO Bridge exploit, cryptocurrency exchange HTX, a prominent project in the Huobi ecosystem, suffered a separate attack that resulted in an additional loss of about $30 million from its hot wallets around the same timeframe.

These attacks followed an attack targeting Poloniex, another Justin Sun-backed exchange, which lost over $100 million.

Following the attacks, HTX took measures to secure remaining funds. Sun also confirmed that HTX would fully compensate for the losses incurred from these breaches.

HTX (formerly Huobi) was acquired by TRON’s founder in 2020. In January this year, Sun said the platform’s original token, HT, was completely converted to a new token called HTX. The transition replaced nearly all HT-related benefits with HTX equivalents, including transaction fee discounts.

In addition to the conversion, HTX also introduced HTX DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization based on HTX’s governance token. The DAO was created to enhance community governance and transparency.

At the time, the conversion sparked controversy among crypto members. Some users felt that the transition meant an abandonment of the original Heco chain and the HT token, particularly following a hack that affected both HTX and Heco.

Falling Prices

Data from CoinGecko shows that HTX DAO’s HTX token dropped by 5% to $0.00000178 following the closure announcement of HECO. It is now trading at around $0.00000183, down around 2% in the last 24 hours.

The decline might also be linked to the recent Bitcoin pullback. Bitcoin dropped below $96,000 on Sunday before surging above $98,000.

Yet, the HTX token recorded a 9% weekly growth. Over the past 30 days, its value has surged 27%.

Huobi Korea, a cryptocurrency exchange originally established as the South Korean branch of Huobi Global (now HTX), announced its shutdown earlier this year. The closure, following the severance of ties with HTX in January 2023, was due to a challenging business environment.

Some regional exchanges also announced its termination around the time, like Cashierest and Coinbit, due to tough market conditions and increasing competition.