Huobi’s exchange token and trading volume have suffered as a result of reports that the company is drastically slashing manpower, compelling employees to accept their salary in stablecoins, and shutting off internal staff communication channels to put down a rebellion.
According to CoinGecko data, Huobi’s HT token has decreased by almost 11% over the past day, to $4.67 as of this AM East Asia time. Over the previous month, the token has decreased by almost 30%.
The exchange’s evaluation of normalized volume over the past 24 hours has decreased 23%, from $510 million to $395 million.
Colin Wu of WuBlockchain was the first to report on the layoffs and the demand to accept salary in stablecoins. Employees were concerned after WuBlockchain stated that individuals who refused to accept receiving payment in cryptocurrency would be fired. On Twitter, some users claimed that employees’ access to internal communication channels had been blocked.
Sun refuted the Huobi layoffs in an interview with Hong Kong’s SCMP. Inquiries from CoinDesk about comments from media representatives regarding staffing difficulties were not answered.
Concern has also grown over Huobi’s post-FTX reserves’ quality. According to a recent analysis from CryptoQuant, Huobi is the exchange that uses its own token to denominate the majority of its reserves out of all the others. It bases about 60% of its reserves on sources other than its token. According to CryptoQuant, OKX and Derebit have the exchanges’ “cleanest” reserves, scoring 100%.
