Rumors and Concerns About Houbi

Market situation

Friday’s session was more upbeat with growth of more than 2% for all three US stock indexes. Gold price also increased slightly to around 1870 USD/ounce. And oil is still moving sideways around 73 USD/barrel.

Bitcoin also rose to nearly $17,000. Altcoins were mostly up slightly.

After the salary announcement, the unemployment report was also released. Nonfarm payrolls rose 223,000 for the month, well above the Dow Jones estimate of 200,000.

The unemployment rate fell to 3.5%, down 0.2% and also better than estimates. Wage growth was below expectations, with average hourly earnings up 4.6% from a year ago, below estimates of 5%. The sectors with the largest increase in employment were leisure and hospitality, followed by healthcare, construction and social assistance. This report shows that the US unemployment situation is still very good. The results also correspond to the ADP salary report.

Not only the United States, European headline inflation, including food and energy costs, also fell to 9.2% year-on-year in December. This figure is lower than 10.1 percent. of November, showing the first slight decline in prices since June 2021.

Earlier this week, data from Germany showed inflation fell from 10% in November to 8.6% in December. However, according to Truflation data, the UK has not shown any signs of slowing down, inflation is still continuing. increase.

Rumors about Houbi

The rumors of the past day about the Huobi exchange continue to scare investors. Because after a series of crypto companies, including the second largest exchange, FTX, collapsed. Rumors of Huobi firing employees, internal conflicts at the company, exchange requiring employees to receive salaries in stablecoins and closing employees’ internal communication channels to quell the rebellion. CEO Justin Sun has denied the layoffs at Huobi. Media representatives did not respond to CoinDesk’s requests for comment regarding staffing.

Twitter page Woo Blockchain again said that Houbi exchange is cutting the year-end commissions of employees. At the same time, this floor will lay off employees from 1200 people to only 600 to 800 employees. This news made investors even more worried.

Yesterday, there was also a relatively large number of users withdrawing money from the exchange. According to the data, about 127 million USD in crypto has been withdrawn from Huobi.

While the bad rumors about Huobi were going on, Justin Sun proceeded to withdraw 200 million USD from Binance to his personal wallet. A flurry of transactions is taking place while rumors of Huobi’s problematic status are growing. Lockonchain Twitter account also released on-chain data showing that, after withdrawing, Justin Sun transferred about 100 million USDT and USDC to Huobi. This raised speculations about the insolvency of this exchange.

Although the amount withdrawn from the exchange is more than 127 million USD, it is still very low compared to the 2.8 billion USD of assets on Huobi. But investors are still worried because Huobi’s reserve assets are more than 31% of their own issued HT tokens. The fear of FTX’s historic crash repeats itself. However, it does not have enough data to indicate any problems in Hubi..

Houbi exchange is based in Beijing, and after the Chinese government enacted stricter laws on crypto in July 2021, this exchange has left China. By August 2022, this exchange had laid off 30% of its employees. And in October, the old owner of Huobi decided to sell the floor and the buyer was Justin Sun. Before the sale was made public, Justin Sun denied that he bought Huobi, causing investors to lose trust in him because he was often dishonest.

Finally, this past day, Huobi exchange confirmed its plan to lay off 20% of its employees as part of the ongoing restructuring process after Justin Sun bought the company. The spokesperson said Huobi has established a new organizational structure after the new shareholders took over, adding that the company has adjusted business divisions.

In the statement, Huobi also emphasized that recent media allegations about the crypto exchange being insolvent are untrue.

This incident shows that Justin Sun continues to make false statements that cause distrust to investors about him personally as well as worse rumors about the tokens or the company he is managing. In addition, Justin Sun has also been involved in drama events many times in the past and his statements are not truthful.

The distrust of Justin Sun also spread the TRON token exchange he leads. Similar to Justin Sun, TRON also encountered many controversial events. As early as 2018, TRON was said to be a copy of other tokens from the very beginning. When looking at the TRON whitepaper, many people point out that it is very similar to the FileCoin and IPFS tokens.

In addition, every time the market emerges with new trends such as DeFi, NFT, protocol tokens, etc., TRON also wants to follow and have those trends in the token. So the information about TRON is a token copy more and more.

At the same time, Justin Sun is also a user of money to buy many other tokens or projects such as BitTorrent, Poloniex exchange, … but in the end these projects or tokens did not achieve success. Justin Sun often participates in drama events and his inconsistent words in front of the media make investors worry that any project he participates in will have a bad ending. Therefore, Huobi is also in that concern of investors, although there is no data to show whether Huobi really has a problem or not.