Public blockchain Nervos enables DeFi for crypto trading platform Hxro

Despite recent market volatility driving DeFi tokens into the red, DeFi as an emerging technology presents real opportunities to transform the existing centralized financial economy. While Ethereum has long stood as the blockchain of choice for DeFi, growing concerns around the network’s high transaction costs and congestion are sending developers in search of new alternatives.

Nervos, which refers to itself as ‘China’s leading blockchain,’ is one of the latest entrants in the DeFi space to challenge Ethereum’s dominance. In recent months, Nervos has bolstered its public blockchain infrastructure to better meet the needs of DeFi projects, including newly added support for live crypto price feeds and other real-time data via decentralized oracle providers Chainlink and Band Protocol. Now, Nervos’ work is starting to pay off.

Hxro, a gamified crypto trading platform, has announced that it will be joining the Nervos ecosystem as it ramps up for expansion in the Asia-Pacific region. By building on Nervos, Hxro plans to bridge its centralized trading platform with new DeFi products slated for release across several Asian markets, starting with a decentralized version of its existing product.

Designed for first-time and hypercasual traders, Hxro’s pari-mutuel market gamifies the crypto trading experience and lets users bet on price movements. A unique trading system called ‘MoonRekt’ lets traders take bullish or bearish positions in widely-traded, standardized time frames with the tap of a button. Nervos will provide the foundation for Hxro to bring a decentralized iteration of its core product to Asia–a key market for Hxro.

According to Hxro’s co-founder and CEO Dan Gunsberg, Asia is an especially attractive market for expansion due to its “strong gaming and trading culture coupled with the region’s growing crypto adoption.” The company plans to launch a suite of fully on-chain Hxro products on Nervos for the Chinese and Southeast Asian markets.

One of the reasons Hxro chose to build on Nervos is its layered architecture. The Nervos layer 1 is a permissionless blockchain that will give Hxro a trustless environment to secure and validate user assets and data. Nervos’ layer 2 will allow Hxro to move transactions off the core layer for more efficiency and scalability. By building its products on-chain, Hxro will be able to better preserve user security and privacy while also unlocking new liquidity for Nervos CKB token holders. The decentralization of Hxro liquidity pools across multiple networks will provide liquidity that already exists across the current Hxro pari-mutuel marketplace.

Commenting on the DeFi market, Nervos co-founder Kevin Wang believes the space is ripe with opportunity but roadblocks like product complexity hinder widespread adoption. “Similar to Hxro, we believe designing DeFi products to be more approachable for the mainstream audience is an important step in moving the industry forward, so Hxro is an exciting addition to the Nervos ecosystem.”

In a market rife with speculation and hype, Hxro’s collaboration with Nervos offers a practical use of blockchain technology bridging centralized and decentralized solutions at scale. As Hxro expands its presence in the Asia-Pacific region, it believes DeFi will enable it to create a “trustless, secure, and scalable solution for its global user base.”