The head of the Huobi crypto exchange, Justin Sun, explained the collapse of the exchange rate of the native token HT exchange by 93% with “market behavior”. On the night of March 9-10, the cryptocurrency fell in price from $4.6 to $0.31 in ten minutes, after which it recovered to $3.87. According to CoinGecko, the daily decline is 20%.
According to Sun, the HT price fluctuations were due to several users instigating a series of liquidations in the spot and contract markets of the token. He noted that users’ assets are safe, and losses caused by sharp movements in the price of the token will be completely taken over by Huobi.
“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,” Sun said.
To boost liquidity on the exchange, Huobi will set up a $100 million liquidity fund, Sun said after the incident. Three hours later, he announced that 100 million USDC had been sent to the platform.
At the same time, the Lookonchain cryptanalyst discovered some recent transactions of the head of Huobi. According to his investigation, on March 9, San withdrew $80 million worth of assets from the exchange: 40 million USDT, 20 million USD (the TRON blockchain stablecoin created by San) and $20 million. Of these, about $60 million was directed to his own DeFi Justlan platform and to the Aave protocol.
On March 10, not only the Huobi exchange token showed a decrease in price. Most of the cryptocurrency market also turned out to be in the red: its total market capitalization decreased by 7% over the day, from $1.043 trillion to $969 billion. The bitcoin rate fell below $20 thousand and updated at least 1.5 months.