Huobi today will formally allow users to trade XRP via its over-the-counter (OTC) service.

The announcement comes straight after XRP was recently listed on Coinbase Pro, proving further excitement for the Ripple community.

A tweet by the official Huobi account read:

“#Huobi OTC #announcement is now here! $XRP @Ripple will launch on #Huobi #OTC at 10:00 6 March.”

Livio Weng further reacted to the news by saying:

“In addition to serving as Huobi Global’s main onramp, Huobi OTC is also our main platform for users who prefer peer-to-peer trading. It’s thus very important to our overall trading ecosystem. The addition of Ripple is a big step forward in expanding our already extensive offering here.”

The OTC update will be available to users in 24 different countries worldwide, with the maker fee differentiating across various currencies. 

Huobi Global ranks as the ninth largest cryptocurrency exchange according to daily volume and accounts for over 5% of total XRP traded daily- contributing more than $20.733 million worth of XRP trading.

OTC trading allows investors who are purchasing large sums of cryptocurrency to buy directly from each other anonymously and with a competent level of liquidity. By using an OTC desk, investors won’t have to participate in price slippage and limits experienced on many cryptocurrency exchanges.

Huobi OTC is Huobi Global’s P2P crypto trading platform. They are operating similarly to other OTC exchanges such as Bitfinex and Localbitcoins. By now allowing for XRP as a trading pair, this will bring further stability to the markets as OTC trading plays a significant part in restricting price fluctuations or flash crashes caused by market whales.

To target more institutional clients, many cryptocurrency exchanges are increasingly introducing OTC functionality. Recently, South Korean crypto exchange Bithumb opened their own OTC desk, and several other significant exchanges such as Binance, Bittrex, Coinbase, and Circle also offer similar OTC services.

Despite the bear market Huobi launched their digital asset derivative trading platform- Huobi Derivatives Market (Huobi DM)- last December, and they have also seen their trading volume double in 2018 in comparison to the previous year.

Source