Huobi Closes NFT Marketplace

Huobi is closing its Huobi NFT trading platform. About this exchange reported on the official site. What exactly caused the closure is unclear.

The exchange claims that they decided to abandon the marketplace due to a change in “strategic plans”. Users are encouraged to withdraw NFTs to external on-chain addresses from Huobi Cloud Wallet by May 13, 2023. After the announced deadline, the exchange will close the marketplace. In mid-February, Huobi also announced the closure of the Huobi Cloud Wallet DeFi wallet. The closing of the project is also scheduled for May 13.

Meanwhile, the exchange faced a collapse of its own token under the ticker HT. The fall was short-lived, and by the time of publication, the token exchange rate had regained some of the lost positions. However, the crash was loud enough not to be noticed. In just a couple of minutes, the HT rate collapsed by more than 90%. Company adviser Justin Sun did not see anything catastrophic in the fall and attributed the strange movements to “market behavior”.

How exactly the traders managed to collapse the token is unclear. However, even despite the rollback of quotes, the HT token is still trading in a daily minus by almost 30%. Against the backdrop of anomalous quotation movements, Sun brought out with Binance $100 million USD coin (USDC) stablecoin for the Huobi Liquidity Fund.

• Previously, Huobi was accused of violating the sanctions regime. POLITICO has found that Huobi, along with KuCoin and Bybit, allows Russians to circumvent sanctions through their peer-to-peer (p2p) trading platforms. It turned out that the exchanges still service cards of sanctioned Russian banks, including Sberbank.
• Moreover, as Inca Digital analysts found out, Bybit supports cards issued by Russian banks. The Binance exchange did not stand aside and also came under accusations of violating sanctions, but soon introduced restrictions for Russians on foreign exchange transactions.