Huobi Dismisses Reports of COO Being Investigated; Token Dips By Over 16% After Controversy

One of the most prominent Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchanges, Huobi has quashed all reports of trouble that alleged that one of its senior executives was reportedly being investigated by Chinese authorities. According to an official post, Huobi Global revealed that the platform was operating normally and went on to affirm that,

“We have become aware of rumors within our community about the arrest of a Huobi senior executive by local officials. We can share with confidence that these rumors are false. All of Huobi’s management team members have been accounted for and have not been detained or arrested. We understand that the spread of false information can lead to concerns about the safety of user assets, but please rest assured your assets are safe.”

This clarification post came hours after the crypto Reporter Colin Wu claimed that the Chief Operating Officer [COO] of Huobi Global was being investigated which apparently triggered “panic” across the Chinese market. In a Twitter thread, the reporter also claimed that Huobi’s Founder and CEO, Jun Du allegedly noted that all user assets were safe and that everything was operating fine.

His tweet further read,

“Huobi employees are on their way back to Beijing from Guizhou. There are rumors that the senior management cannot be contacted because they are on the plane. In Guizhou, Li Lin said that he is not afraid of supervision and he is confident that he has not done anything illegal.”

Huobi Token takes a plunge

Over the past couple of months, Huobi’s native token – HT has maintained a consistent upward trajectory. The downtrend, however, started quite recently, to be more specific, it was the pullback in the second week of October that led to a substantial correction in several exchange tokens. Despite a few attempts to breach overhead resistance, HT appeared to be declining. It was not until the 2nd of November that price saw a steep depreciation coinciding with the news of the exchange’s execs.

Over the last day, HT was down by more than 16%. On the brighter side, the token resumed a mild uptrend as Huobi posted its clarification on the issue, following which HT noted a minor uptick to $3.81.

Julien Bouteloup, popular decentralized finance [DeFi] security auditor and developer not convinced by Wu’s report had tweeted:

OKEx Episode Comes to Haunt

This episode was hauntingly similar to yet another cryptocurrency exchange giant OKEx that was recently involved in a controversy in which Chinese authorities had launched an investigation couple of weeks ago. One of the exec who was responsible for users’ private keys- accounts where crypto assets are stored was “out of touch” while cooperating with the investigation.

What was further disturbing was Wu’s yet another claim that the Founder of not just OKEx but also Huobi were “not allowed” to leave China as they were “controlled by the government”.