- Sharlyn Wu joins Huobi DeFi Labs as its CIO after heading CMBI’s blockchain investment arm.
- Reportedly, Huobi DeFi Labs will focus on research, investment, and incubation of DeFi projects.
- The DeFi sector had surged past £3.07 billion.
Huobi Group, the operator of leading crypto exchange Huobi has hired Sharlyn Wu, a former banking giant as the head of its new business unit dubbed Huobi DeFi Labs. A report unveiled this news on August 3, noting that Huobi DeFi Labs would initially comprise four staff. Sharlyn Wu would become the initiative’s Chief Investment Officer (CIO), according to the publication.
According to the report, Sharlyn Wu joins the organization after leading the blockchain investment arm at China Merchant Bank International (CMBI) for three years. During Wu’s term at CMBI, the bank invested in multiple crypto and blockchain firms. These include Bitpie, a crypto startup, and Nervos, a public blockchain project.
Commenting on this appointment, Wu said,
“It is exciting to see the power of the permissionless economy unleashed at global scale. However, there are still many problems to be solved at the theoretical and technical levels.”
Increasing focus on the DeFi sector
Huobi DeFi Labs will focus on research, investment, and incubation of DeFi-related initiatives. Huobi Group reportedly aims to invest tens of millions of its own capital in this project. The launch of this project comes at a time that Venture Capital firms continue investing in De-Fi Protocols.
For instance, Injective Protocol, a decentralized derivatives exchange protocol incubated by Binance Labs disclosed that it had secured £2 million in a Pantera Capital-led seed round. The funding round involved other leading investment firms such as QCP Soteria, Axia8 Ventures, Boxone Ventures, and Bitlink Capital among others.
Reportedly, Injective Protocol was among eight projects that Binance inducted into its incubation program in 2018. The startup aims to remove scalability issues and bottlenecks that can ruin the user experience on decentralized exchanges (DEXs).
Massive growth in the DeFi sector
The DeFi sector continues displaying massive growth. According to data from Defipulse.com, the total value locked in the DeFi sector hits £3.07 billion. Crossing this threshold has seen the sector set a new all-time high.
