After learning that Tron was laying off employees, crypto billionaire and creator Justin Sun shifted $100 million of his stablecoins to his Huobi exchange today.
According to blockchain data from Nansen, the money was taken out of Binance and then transmitted to Huobi, in which Sun owns controlling ownership.
Tether and USD Coin (USDC) served as the currency. Afterward, Sun told Bloomberg that he had sent the “personal funds” to “demonstrate his trust in the Huobi exchange.”
The move “could be to help with the higher withdrawals or preserve a degree of trust in the exchange,” Nansen’s Martin Lee wrote on Twitter.
Customers are taking out large sums of money; according to Nansen today, $60.9 million of the $94.2 million net outflow over the last week occurred in the past 24 hours.
Huobi, headquartered in Singapore and the fourth-largest exchange for digital assets with $371 million in 24-hour trading volume, has recently struggled. Today, Reuters claimed that Huobi would let go of 20% of its workforce after Sun disputed the allegations.
Additionally, independent crypto journalist Colin Wu revealed last week that staff pay was being paid in stablecoins, which sparked employee complaints.
“First, it’s important to recognize that the world of crypto can be volatile and uncertain at times. There will always be ups and downs, and it’s easy to get caught up in the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) that can come with it,” Sun said on Twitter Friday.
The “FUD” from Huobi comes at a time when consumers’ trust in digital asset exchanges is in jeopardy. Just last month, the biggest exchange in the world, Binance, released a statement assuring investors that its finances were in order.
One of the most well-known and well-marketed cryptocurrency exchanges, FTX, had a dramatic collapse in November. According to its new CEO John J Ray, who is in charge of the company’s bankruptcy reorganization, the firm lost billions of dollars in customer cash because it was reportedly mishandled by “a very small group of highly incompetent and naive personnel.”
The FTX problems began when a selloff in the exchange’s FTT token shook client trust and caused them to hurry to withdraw their money. Due to a subsequent liquidity crisis, the firm was compelled to acknowledge that it did not have one-to-one reserves of customer funds. As a result, the exchange had to disable withdrawals before declaring bankruptcy.
Since then, the whole crypto ecosystem—coins, tokens, and businesses—has been in disarray.