Huobi Global – one of the world’s biggest digital currency exchanges – has announced that it’s going to release approximately 20 percent of its staff due to the ongoing volatility and speculation of the digital currency industry.
Huobi Global Is Parting with Several Staff Members
A Huobi spokesperson said:
With the current state of the bear market, a very lean team will be maintained going forward.
Huobi employed about 1,600 people in October of last year. With the 20 percent ratio in play, the company is slated to let go of more than 300 people at the time of writing. The company says it simply cannot deal with the falling crypto prices that continue to ravage the space, and thus having a small team of players onboard will allow the enterprise to maintain its operations and financial reserves.
Huobi is presently based in Seychelles, an island nation off the southern coast of Africa. The company was initially founded in China, though executives packed up and moved 3,000 miles away in late 2021 after the country’s capital of Beijing initiated an anti-crypto rhetoric that caused all trading and related activities to practically become illegal overnight.
2022 has arguably been the worst year for digital currency, and while we’re now in 2023, we’re still reeling from the many horrible effects of the last 12 months. Many digital currency exchanges have been forced to part with team members. Big enterprises like Gemini in New York and Coinbase, which announced last summer that it would be losing roughly 18 percent of its staff.
Things have not repaired themselves for the latter exchange, which just released news a few days ago that it was going to be letting another 1,000 people go.
At press time, Huobi enjoys daily trading volumes that exceed $300 million. However, it’s unclear if this recent news will cause customers to lose faith in the exchange, meaning these trade numbers could either diminish or grow exponentially as people seek to get their money out of the company in fear that it could soon go under.
The news has also delivered a hard blow to HT, the native token of the exchange. Currently, HT is down more than seven percent.
This Keeps Happening!
While Huobi’s trading services have left China, the company still maintains a consulting firm on the mainland, while Huobi is owned by a Hong Kong-based asset manager known as About Capital Management.
Mistrust and concerns surrounding centralized exchanges like Huobi have only grown in recent weeks following the fallout of popular digital asset firm FTX, which was long considered the golden boy of the crypto arena. The company fell into a heap of bankruptcy and fraud in the final weeks of 2022 which ultimately saw its head executive Sam Bankman-Fried arrested in the Bahamas.
