Heco is about to close, what should we do with on-chain assets?

Jessy, Golden Finance

According to the latest announcement from Huobi Exchange, the Heco chain will officially shut down on January 20, 2025. After January 20, deposits and withdrawals on the Heco chain will no longer be accepted.

In November 2023, the cross-chain bridge of the Heco chain was hacked, resulting in the loss of virtual currencies worth a total of $8540. Since then, the Heco chain has been in a prolonged state of suspension.

In 2024, Huobi gradually opened deposits and withdrawals for some mainstream coins on the Heco chain, but there are certain time restrictions for deposits and withdrawals for each coin. Huobi exchange will periodically suspend deposits and withdrawals for some tokens; if you miss this time window, you will no longer have a channel to process assets on the official website.

Currently, only Huobi exchange supports deposit and withdrawal services for the Heco chain, and even on Huobi, there are only USDT and HT tokens' Heco chain assets that can still be normally deposited into Huobi.

With the change of ownership of Huobi, the Heco chain has long been in disarray, and it wasn't until the Heco cross-chain bridge was hacked that the death knell for the Heco chain was truly sounded.

And by January 20, 2025, the Heco chain officially came to an end.

Heco and HT, long abandoned by Sun Yuchen

The Heco chain was born in 2020, during the rise of DeFi. Huobi decided to establish its own public chain, and during the bull market of 2021, relying on Huobi as the world's largest exchange, the Heco chain also developed rapidly, with a significant increase in TVL. Huobi also launched related ecological funds to strongly support various outstanding projects on the Heco chain. At that time, popular projects in the ecosystem continuously emerged, attracting many users and developers, and it became one of the popular public chains.

According to DeFiLlama data, at its peak, the TVL on the Heco chain reached 2.8 billion USD in 2021. Currently, the TVL on the Heco chain is only 1.18 million USD.

In 2022, Li Lin sold Huobi to Sun Yuchen. In 2023, the Heco chain also faced a series of scandals and issues, such as the price collapse of its oracle iHash Bridge Oracle (HBO), the issuance scandal of its insurance project Book Finance (BOOK), the fabrication of the audit report for the TokenLink oracle project, and the running away incident of Gainswap. These events severely damaged the reputation and ecosystem of the HECO chain. By the end of 2023, a theft incident occurred at the cross-chain bridge of the HECO chain, which then fell into a long-term stagnation. In 2024, the liquidity crisis of the currencies on its chain became prominent, with insufficient trading depth, making it difficult for investors to liquidate their assets.

Although in 2024, Huobi briefly provided deposit and withdrawal services for some mainstream tokens on the Heco chain, the duration was short, and many users missed it. The current owner of Huobi, Sun Yuchen, has completely abandoned the Heco chain, and the original platform token HT has also been discarded. A new platform token HTX was launched at the beginning of 2024, and HT users can choose to exchange HT for HTX.

Currently, the price of HT has already dropped by more than 90% from the price during the last bull market. For users, continuing to hold assets on the Heco chain is definitely not a wise choice.

Except for HT and USDT, all other Heco chain assets are invalid

Currently, if there are still deposited HT on the Heco chain, it can be directly withdrawn to the Huobi exchange. Although the exchange does not currently provide trading pairs for HT, users can exchange HT for HTX, with a conversion rate of 0.64.

Alternatively, after transferring HT to Huobi exchange, you can further transfer it to exchanges like Gate that also have HT trading pairs via the ETH chain for trading. As of the time of writing, the price of HT on Gate is around 1.3U.

USDT on the Heco chain can currently still be withdrawn to Huobi exchange, but if users have other accumulated assets, it seems there is no way to do so.

Currently, in various communities, it is still common to see group members frequently posting messages related to "recycling Heco chain assets." A reporter from Golden Finance randomly contacted a group member who posted such a message.

He told the Golden Finance reporter that he is recycling HT at a price of 1U each, and other assets on the Heco chain are also being recycled, but at prices far below the market rate. For example, since Huobi no longer accepts Mana assets on the Heco chain, he can only recycle the token at about one-tenth of its price.

Currently, the HT token has no fundamental value and serves no purpose, yet it still has a market capitalization of 200 million dollars.

A reporter asked this group friend who is engaged in on-chain asset recovery why he wanted to recover these tokens. His response was that some people have faith in these coins.

But there's no early rise without profit; for a businessman, there are likely more profitable opportunities here. If he recovers HT at 1U, even if he sells it on exchanges like Gate at the current price of 1.3U each, he could make a profit of about 30%.

The reporter did not attempt to trade with him, so there is no way to determine if this is a scam. There is a possibility of a scam where the coins are sent to him but he does not send the money back, so readers are advised to discern for themselves.

For users, a relatively reliable way to handle assets on the Heco chain is through the Huobi official website. If there are still deposits of USDT and HT on the Heco chain, they can be withdrawn to the exchange for further processing. However, there are currently no official channels for handling other assets, and seeking third-party processing also carries a high risk of fraud.