Huobi’s HT Token Suddenly Falls 93%, Then Rebounds Just as Quickly

Huobi’s HT token, the native token of the cryptocurrency exchange, momentarily dropped 93% on Thursday for reasons that are unclear.

And then it quickly rebounded.

The token dropped from a 24-hour-high of $4.81 to a low of $0.31 at around 21:00 UTC on Huobi’s exchange, according to TradingView’s pricing source. Other exchanges saw a similar drop in price.

Just before the crash, $2 million worth of sales were reported in the five minutes leading up to it, a researcher at Kaiko tweeted. Normally, buys on the HT-USDT pair amount to about $600,000.

At press time, the token had rebounded and was trading at $3.70 on Huobi. It is down about 24% over the past 24 hours.

The wild price action was notable because HT is one of the larger cryptocurrencies, with a market capitalization of about $630 million (after the rebound). Crypto traders follow the token partly because Justin Sun, founder of the Tron blockchain, has disclosed that he’s a big holder – in addition to being a leader of the exchange’s strategy.

Sun, in a tweet, said the Huobi exchange’s operations are safe, as are its wallets and backend. In a second tweet, he apologized for the “leveraged liquidation on the market caused by a few users,” and said Huobi will create a $100 million fund to improve multi-currency liquidity.

UPDATE (March 10, 2023 00:53 UTC): Updates with Justin Sun comment in final two paragraphs.

UPDATE (March 10, 2023 02:01 UTC): Adds additional comment from Justin Sun.