The recently passed summer saw a fierce battle for food delivery services in mainland China. The price of a cup of milk tea, after applying platform coupons, can be just a few yuan or even "0 yuan purchase." Multiple food delivery platforms are "spending heavily" on subsidies to seize users, cultivating consumption habits and thereby forming market scale. Now, this logic has been replicated in the crypto market's financial management sector. The crypto "subsidy war" has officially begun.

Recently, Huobi HTX global advisor Justin Sun stated on social platform X regarding high-yield financial products, "100% of the high-yield interest comes from group subsidies," and "we can afford the subsidies." This undoubtedly escalates the intense competition among trading platforms to a fever pitch. Standing at the top of the "food chain," crypto exchanges have entered a new round of deep internal competition more than 15 years after the birth of Bitcoin.

Crypto "Food Delivery War": The Logic Behind High-Yield Subsidies

Browsing the public data of several mainstream trading platforms reveals that high-yield financial products have become an important means for trading platforms to seize market share. Similar to the internet food delivery war, trading platforms quickly gather users through subsidies in the early stages of competition, forming liquidity advantages, and then solidify long-term barriers through capital accumulation and ecological expansion.

From the landscape perspective, almost all leading platforms have joined this competition. From C2C business to financial activities, from spot trading to contract trading, major exchanges have employed various strategies to attract new users, activate old users, retain funds, and increase trading activity. A review of the financial management sector shows that Binance attracts large funds through tiered interest rates and locked periods, OKX offers higher interest rates for 180-day fixed terms, KuCoin leans towards medium to long-term coin storage, Bybit provides moderate returns on stablecoins and BTC, while Huobi HTX opts for higher interest subsidies through more direct flexible products. Different platforms have their own strategies, but the logic is consistent: using interest as a subsidy means to seize users and scale of funds.

The rationale is that the business model of trading platforms shares similarities with food delivery and ride-hailing platforms— the more users and capital accumulation, the stronger the platform's trading depth and product richness, forming a virtuous cycle. "Burning money to acquire users" subsidies are not a wasteful consumption but rather a pre-paid cost for platforms to compete for future market share. Once users have formed capital accumulation and usage habits on a certain platform, the migration cost will significantly increase, allowing subsequent services such as trading, financial management, and lending to be completed within the same platform, thus enabling the platform to benefit in the long term and achieve a win-win with users.

How to Create Differentiated Advantages in Financial Subsidies—Taking Huobi Earn as an Example

In the current landscape of the subsidy war, major platforms adopt different strategies to establish differentiated advantages. We will make a simple horizontal comparison using specific currency interest rates. Taking ETH as an example, Huobi HTX's flexible earn rate for the 0-0.2 ETH range reaches 6%, far exceeding Binance's 1.47% and Bybit's 0.8%, while OKX's corresponding rate can also reach 5% but comes with a 180-day fixed term limitation. The comparison shows that Huobi HTX's subsidy coverage is broader, with interest advantages found in more financial currencies ranging from stablecoins USDT, USDD, to mainstream coins ETH, BTC, XRP, and even DOGE, SHIB, and TRUMP.

In addition to high annualized subsidies, let's also highlight other differentiated advantages that Huobi HTX possesses:

• Broader currency coverage and continuous introduction of new coins: Compared to other platforms, Huobi HTX offers a significantly larger variety of earning currencies, including not only mainstream coins and stablecoins but also emerging project tokens. Huobi HTX launches new coin earning activities almost every week, which is highly competitive. For users, whether they are conservative investors holding stablecoins or users seeking high-volatility returns from new coins, they can find suitable products in Huobi Earn.
• Greater flexibility and 0 threshold for deposits: Many of Huobi Earn's high-yield products, including USDC, USD1, USDD, TRUMP, and other flexible products, do not require long-term locking, have a 0 threshold for investment, and no upper limit on subscription amounts. Users can deposit and withdraw at any time without being bound by long cycles like other platforms, resulting in higher capital utilization efficiency.
• Open and transparent security guarantees: In addition to returns and flexibility, Huobi HTX discloses Merkle tree asset reserve proofs (PoR) every month and has maintained a reserve ratio of 100% or above for three consecutive years. This means that users can enjoy high-interest subsidies while also having access to a secure and transparent asset guarantee system for their funds, reducing potential risks.

Long-Term Value Beyond High-Yield Subsidies

Although there are concerns about whether subsidies can be sustained in the long term, based on the experience of the internet food delivery subsidy wars, this competitive logic is unlikely to disappear in the short term. Moreover, for exchanges, high-yield subsidies are merely a means of attracting traffic; the real value lies in the trading behavior of users after they have settled in and the continuous prosperity of the platform's ecosystem.

High-yield financial management is not just a simple "money-giving" activity but a reflection of the evolving competitive landscape of the entire crypto industry. From internet food delivery to crypto finance, the subsidy war is about platforms competing for users and expanding market share. Huobi HTX is establishing differentiated advantages in the crypto financial management sector with higher interest rates, broader currency coverage, and more flexible product designs.

This crypto "new food delivery war" has just begun.