Huobi (HT) tokenOn Friday, January 6, Reuters reporters, citing their own sources , wrote that the management of the Huobi exchange plans to cut 20% of its staff. Well-known crypto-entrepreneur Justin Sun, who took over as an adviser to Huobi last October
Openly called the statements of journalists a lie and published several inspiring publications on social networks about the state and plans of the trading platform, RBC Crypto writes .
Journalists have repeatedly called Sun the siacoin price prediction new owner of the exchange, despite his formal position on the board. By a number of indications, he is the de facto manager of Huobi and speaks publicly on behalf of the platform.
Despite Sun’s assurances, negative news has often surfaced around Huobi in recent weeks. Evidence leaked to the network that the management of the exchange was cutting salaries and bonuses, planning further layoffs of up to 60% of the staff, and forcibly transferring employee pay from yuan to USDT and USDC stablecoins.
According to some reports, such events provoke employee protests, and exchange managers delete internal work chats and do not compromise. None of this has been officially confirmed, but some of the news is published by journalists who have a reputation as reliable sources of information. Among them is Colin Wu, who has been covering the Asian segment of the crypto market for several years.
“Return to the Leaders”
Despite Sun’s claims, on the same day, a Huobi spokesperson confirmed the cuts in comments to reporters from The Block and Cointelegraph. He said that the exchange really plans to lay off up to 20% of employees, but in fact, the reductions have not yet begun. According to him, taking into account the current state of the market, in the future the exchange team will be forced to continue working in a small number.
“Personnel optimization aims to implement the brand strategy, increase efficiency and return [Huobi] to the top three,” a representative of the exchange wrote in a comment to The Block.
Huobi Exchange, founded in 2013, is registered in Seychelles and has offices in Hong Kong, USA, Japan and South Korea. The platform recently announced plans to move its headquarters to the Caribbean region. Huobi remains one of the largest crypto exchanges in terms of trading volume. According to CoinMarketCap, the platform has a daily turnover of more than $330 million, and its website has more than 12.5 million monthly visitors.
Carry out mass layoffs
The exchange’s leading competitors were also forced to carry out mass layoffs last year. The second largest crypto exchange Coinbase laid off 1,100 employees in the summer, explaining the decision by preparing for a “long crypto winter”. About the same number of employees were forced to leave their jobs at Kraken in November, and ByBit, Crypto.com, Gate.io and other trading platforms also reported layoffs.
The head of the largest crypto exchange Binance, Changpeng Zhao, sent out a memo to employees in December, in which he said that you should be prepared for the fact that “the next months will not be easy.” Each of the platforms continues to work, despite massive layoffs.
However, the wave of negativity surrounding Huobi has inevitably taken its toll on the market. While Sun and others at the exchange denied the rumors, anxiety grew among its users and bystanders in the community, traders began to massively transfer assets to external wallets, fearing even a minimal risk of insolvency of the exchange after a series of crashes and bankruptcies of major players in the crypto market in 2022.
Huobi (HT) token “Dirty” reserves
Against the background of rumors and turbulence in the trading of the native Huobi (HT) token, analysts recorded a significant outflow of funds from the exchange on January 6. According to the monitoring platform Nansen, in just one day, users withdrew more than $60 million from the exchange, and the weekly outflow of coins exceeded $100 million. Most of the assets were withdrawn in stablecoins and Ethereum (ETH) coins.
On the same day, blockchain transaction researchers noticed that Sun’s personal wallets received $100 million in USDT and USDC stablecoins from the Binance exchange address. Further tracking of the transfers revealed that Sun sent the funds directly to Huobi.
Prior to this replenishment, the balance of the exchange in stablecoins dipped by 9.5% over the week and amounted to $681 million, as evidenced by data from the CryptoQuant analytical platform. The CEO of the service, Ki Yung Joo, in comments to CoinDesk , recalled that a massive outflow of stablecoins was also observed on the FTX exchange just a few days before its collapse. According to its analysts, activity on Huobi user addresses has dipped 44 times compared to the peak values in May 2019, and as of January 3, the figure is 20 times lower than that of Binance.
In a vulnerable position
Ju also noted that over the past year, Huobi’s reserves in bitcoins have decreased by 90%, while Binance, on the contrary, has doubled the reserves of BTC on wallets. According to him, Huobi has the most “dirty” reserves, since the largest part of them is stored in the exchange’s native tokens, which are highly exposed to the risks of price fluctuations, which again was clearly shown by the example of FTX.
The head of CryptoQuant believes that Huobi is “in a vulnerable position.” Analyzing the outflows of funds on the exchange, representatives of another analytical platform Arkham in the official account of the service on Twitter (the social network is blocked in Russia) explicitly urged subscribers to withdraw funds from the site.
According to Nansen, Huobi controls more than 80% of HT tokens. According to CoinMarketCap, as of January 7, HT has a daily trading volume of $11.4 million with a total market capitalization of $770 million. The token exchange rate fell by more than 30% in a month – from $6.60 to $4.75. In the last week alone, the cryptocurrency has fallen in price by 17.5%.
After the influx of funds to the exchange from Sun’s wallets was recorded, commentators on Twitter drew attention to the appearance of a large order of 1 million HT in the Huobi order book. “No doubt” about who posted it, wrote one user.
Coins of Jasin Sun
Jasin Sun made his first money with Peiwo, the Chinese version of Snapchat. In 2014, he joined the crypto community and then only dealt with blockchain projects. That same year, he became the Ripple representative in China and later founded the Tron Network with the Tron (TRX) coin in the form of a token on the Ethereum network. In 2018, TRX was transferred to its own blockchain. On which the USDT stablecoin issued by Tether was launched the following year.
During a period of high fees and long loopring price prediction on the Ethereum network. A significant portion of users switched to USDT on the Tron blockchain. On the Bestchange online exchanger aggregator, the USDT stablecoin, in the form of a TRC20 standard token. It is consistently on the list of the most popular exchange directions.
Tron Foundation’s own algorithmic stablecoin USDD
However, Tron Foundation’s own algorithmic stablecoin USDD is apparently struggling amid the wave of negative news around Huobi. The coin has lost its peg to the dollar since January 5. And at the time of publication of the article, its rate is at $0.97.
The price of the Tron cryptocurrency (TRX) also sank sharply by almost 8% over the day on January 6. The weekly drop in its rate was about 7%. The @lookonchain Twitter account administrator, who tracks major cryptocurrency transactions. Noticed that shortly before the TRX price plummeted. Someone borrowed 90 million TRX (approximately $4.85 million) on the JustLend lending platform. And then transferred them for sale on Binance. Where they successfully got into a short position, playing for a fall in price. Comments on the tweet ironically hinted that none other than Sun himself might be behind the deal.
On his Twitter account with 3.4 million followers. Sun writes that “the key to success” is to “ignore the rumors and keep creating,” citing Changpeng Zhao’s December tweet. Concluding a series of motivational posts about the future of the crypto industry in English and Chinese. Sun summarizes that this is the strategy that Huobi is following.
