Huobi Group announced a limited rollout of Huobi ECO Chain (Heco), an EVM-compatible public chain that provides blockchain developers with an efficient and low-cost on-chain environment for decentralized applications (dApps), smart contracts, and digital assets. Starting December 11, 2020, developers will have early access to Heco's test environment to build and experiment on the chain ahead of its upcoming public testnet launch on December 21st. Heco is the first product launched on Huobi Open Platform, a unified blockchain infrastructure platform independently developed by Huobi's technical team. As a fully decentralized, high-efficiency chain, Heco was purpose-designed to support high-performance transactions and provide smart contract compatibility, enabling high throughput, low latency, security, and stability. In addition to lowering development and maintenance costs for developers, Heco links users, assets, and dApps in an open and decentralized network that supports EVM programmability and smart contract compatibility. Heco utilizes the Hybrid Proof of Stake (HPOS) consensus mechanism to secure assets and on-chain transitions. Heco uses Huobi Token (HT) as its native asset, giving users immediate access to liquidity and token utility as part of Huobi's growing ecosystem. In the future, Heco will integrate with Ethereum as a Layer 2 solution to bring greater efficiency to the Ethereum network.