Huobi is melting down in real-time.

Huobi has withdrawn another 70 million US dollars yesterday, accounting for 3.5% of Huobi’s scale. Huobi is reportedly laying off up to 50% of its team, cancelling all year-end bonuses, cutting salaries of senior employees and requiring employees to take their salaries in stablecoins instead of fiat. Showing a strong likelihood that Huobi has lost access to all its fiat offramps.

Justin Sun has closed the communication group with internal employees today, blocking all communication and feedback channels with employees to quell a rebellion that has taken a toll on its exchange token and trading volume. This is very dangerous, and it is not ruled out that internal employees rebel and directly rug away user assets or programmers add backdoor Trojan horses. Such incidents have occurred on multiple exchanges in the past year.

If employees were to suddenly rug and take user assets, Sun wouldn’t be able to do much about it as this is not protected by domestic laws (Huobi is based in Seychelles, East Africa), and employees are likely to get away with it legally due to the lack of crypto laws domestically. The latest judicial interpretations and precedents also emphasize once again that they are not protected by law. (A few years ago, the court also partially supported it, but now it does not recognize its legal protection)

Those who have assets on Huobi must withdraw them quickly and should uninstall the Huobi app to prevent it from being automatically updated to a version with a Trojan horse. A few days ago, an automatic update Trojan was implanted in the bitkeep background, resulting in the theft of many user assets.

In the past couple months Huobi has been attempting to convert payroll from fiat to USDT/USDC in which employees were very unhappy about and started attacking Justin Sun on twitter using shill accounts. Meanwhile, Justin Sun (an "advisor" to the exchange, seen by many as the man in charge) has cashed out $1.5B+ in fiat since October, according to his tagged wallets

It has also been noticed that yesterday when it was first reported that Sun shut down communication channels with employees that the feds also made a move on Silvergate bank (which is down more than 50% since the move) and ~$90M was seized by the DOJ. It’s been previously confirmed that Huobi banks with and uses Silvergate as a fiat ramp, as did FTX.

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2023/01/06/huobi-exchange-token-down-11-on-reports-of-layoffs-internal-strife-at-company/

https://coingeek.com/huobi-to-lay-off-over-300-employees-amid-its-debacle-with-pi-network-report/

https://twitter.com/cryptadamist/status/1611129612217778176

https://twitter.com/wublockchain/status/1610615698254102529?s=46&t=LADJknPDKBxsdDwoNTEu6Q

https://twitter.com/scopeprotocol/status/1607983914907500544?s=46&t=LADJknPDKBxsdDwoNTEu6Q

Edit: Sources and first and last paragraph*