Digital-asset entrepreneur Justin Sun transferred about $100 million worth of stablecoins to his crypto exchange Huobi Global, which has been hit by a wave of withdrawals.
(Bloomberg) — Digital-asset entrepreneur Justin Sun transferred about $100 million worth of stablecoins to his crypto exchange Huobi Global, which has been hit by a wave of withdrawals.
An Ethereum wallet associated with Sun withdrew $50 million of Tether’s USDT and $50 million of Circle Financial’s USDC from the Binance exchange on Friday, and roughly three hours later sent the tokens to Huobi, according to blockchain research firm Nansen. Stablecoins are tokens pegged to an asset like the US dollar, and commonly used to transfer money onto and off exchanges.
“It just shows the confidence to Huobi exchange,” Sun said of the transfers in a Telegram message. “It’s just my personal funds.”
The transactions came amid elevated pressure on Singapore-based Huobi, which saw about $85 million of crypto outflows over a 24-hour period according to data from Coinglass. The exchange said on Friday that it plans to fire about 20% of its workforce and will maintain a “very lean team” as a slump in crypto markets enters its second year.
- Read more: Cryptocurrency Exchange Huobi Plans to Cut 20% of Workforce
Sun last year spent about $1 billion to purchase a roughly 60% stake in Huobi, Bloomberg News reported in November. Lee, a Nansen data journalist, said in a tweet on Friday that moving stablecoins onto Huobi “might be to help with the increased withdrawals or maintain a level of confidence in the exchange.”
Huobi’s stablecoin reserves jumped to 732 million tokens from 657 million tokens in the span of an hour on Friday, according to data from researcher CryptoQuant which appear to support Nansen’s findings. The reserves have since declined to 683 million stablecoins.
Uncertainty around the exchange is hitting tokens linked to Huobi and Sun, the founder of blockchain Tron. Huobi’s exchange coin HT fell as much as 9% on Friday according to data from CoinGecko. Tron’s native token TRX dropped as much as 7.4%.
Sun’s stablecoin USDD, which is meant to be pegged 1-to-1 to the dollar, was trading just below 98 cents, according to CoinGecko.
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