Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of crypto exchange FTX, denied on Tuesday that he has a plan to buy out another crypto exchange, Huobi, after a rumor circulating on Chinese social media said that FTX has acquired the exchange.
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Fast facts
- “No, we are not planning to acquire Huobi,” Bankman-Fried said on Twitter, to be “explicit because apparently a lot of people are saying this.”
- On Monday, a user with over 500,000 followers on Chinese social media Weibo — a platform similar to Twitter — said that FTX had acquired Huobi, and Huobi will be renamed as HTX. The post was cited by crypto media 8BTC on Twitter in English.
- In earlier August, a Bloomberg report said the founder of the Chinese-originated crypto exchange Huobi Group, Leon Li, was in talks to sell a majority stake of the company, with Sam Bankman-Fried and Tron founder Justin Sun as interested investors. However, Sun has denied his acquisition intentions.
- Huobi is facing regulatory backlash in Southeast Asia, with Thailand’s SEC confiscating the exchange’s license and Malaysian regulators discussing with Huobi the possibility of being placed on an investor warning list.
- FTX is one of the largest cryptocurrency spot exchanges in the world and surpassed Coinbase for the first time in volume earlier this year, according to crypto analysis company Kaiko. The exchange’s revenue grew by more than 1,000% in 2021, according to CNBC, citing a leaked financial report.
- Sam Bankman-Fried signed deals to bail out cryptocurrency lenders BlockFi and Voyager after they went insolvent amid the bear market.
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