coinedition.com
According to a screenshot shared by a Twitter crypto influencer on Thursday, the native token of the Chinese Huobi Global exchange, HT, flash fell by 93% from a daily high of $4.9375 to about $0.313. The coin rebounded by over 1084% in ten minutes to $3.0954.
bruh pic.twitter.com/ixoDYwTc2r
— db (@tier10k) March 9, 2023
The development stirred the crypto community with fear, uncertainty, and doubt, given that the Chinese asset manager has a recent history of instability with the USDD stablecoin. According to a tweet by Kaiko, an institutional-grade crypto market tracker, five minutes before the collapse, transactions of $2 million were registered, which was much more than the typical $600,000 purchases on the HT/USDT pair.
However, Huobi Global’s advisor Justin Sun tweeted that the exchange was safe, including its wallets and backend. Sun clarified that the recent market fluctuations and the leveraged liquidations were caused by a few users triggering a cascade of forced liquidations in the spot and HT contract markets. “All work is proceeding steadily, and there are no unexpected incidents,” he added.
The operation of @HuobiGlobal exchange is #SAFE, the wallets are SAFE, and the backend is SAFE. The recent market fluctuations and the leveraged liquidations were caused by few users triggering a cascade of forced liquidations in the spot and HT contract markets.
— H.E. Justin Sun 孙宇晨 (@justinsuntron) March 10, 2023
While the 24-hour trading volume of the Huobi token is up by over 333%, the coin lost its previous ranking among the most significant token by market cap, according to CoinMarketcCp data.
In January, Huobi reportedly closed communication with some internal employees, causing them to rebel and directly rug away user assets, with developers adding backdoor Trojan horses. Consequently, crypto analytic firm Nansen highlighted that the withdrawal volume of Huobi in a 24-hour period was 64% more than its seven days total outflows.