Huobi Speculations Plummet TRX, Depeg USDD Despite Justin Sun's $100M Deposit

While the broader crypto market started to rise over the weekend, TRX, the world's 18th largest crypto asset by market capitalization, saw its price plummet and TRON-based stablecoin USDD depegged from the dollar despite Justin Sun's fat deposit of $100 million to the exchange after speculations of its closure spread like wildfire online.

Huobi exchange seemingly confirmed last week that rumors about it reducing its workforce by 20% are true when its spokesperson Kate Li said, "With the current state of the bear market, a very lean team will be maintained going forward."

Aside from that, crypto Twitter exploded last week when several accounts asked Huobi users to withdraw their funds from the exchange after Sun reportedly "blocked all communication and feedback channels with employees" and shut down "the communication group with internal employees" last week.

"Sun Huobi has closed the communication group with internal employees today and blocked all communication and feedback channels with employees. 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," read an English-translated tweet from a Twitter user who goes by the handle BitRunX.

"Those who have assets on Huobi must withdraw them quickly, and those who have no assets must uninstall the Huobi app to prevent it from being automatically updated to a version with a Trojan horse," the Twitter user added.

Following reports, Huobi's token HT plunged by almost 11% and traded at $4.67, Tron's token TRX plummeted 9.31% at $0.5034 from its previous price of $0.5551 on Jan. 4, and the Tron-based stablecoin USDD sunk 1.22% at $0.9697 from its previous price of $0.9817.

Within the day and following the downtrend, crypto mogul and Tron founder Sun moved $100 million of his stablecoins to his crypto exchange Huobi.

Blockchain data from Nansen revealed that the fund was withdrawn from Binance and then sent to Huobi.

"At @HuobiGlobal, we believe that the key to success in the world of cryptocurrency is to 'Ignore FUD and Keep Building,'" Sun said in a Twitter thread in an attempt to put worried users at ease following the surge of withdrawals.

But, it appeared that the $100 million additional fund deposited to Huobi worked somehow, considering that Nansen reported withdrawals slowed down Sunday after a massive $60.9 million was withdrawn from the exchange Friday.

Blockchain analytics platform Nansen reported that on midday Sunday, withdrawals from Huobi fell by $12 million compared to the amount withdrawn the previous day.

As of 11:36 p.m. ET on Sunday, USDD was trading up 0.18% at $0.9778 with a 24-hour volume of $17,405,183, TRX was trading up 7.37% at $0.05556 with a 24-hour volume of $297,393,120, and HT was trading up 2.62% at $4.82 with a 24-hour volume of $7,683,147, according to the latest data from CoinMarketCap.