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Huobi confirms its plans to ‘gradually retire’ existing users from mainland China

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Major cryptocurrency exchange, Huobi Global has had a tough time dealing with the Chinese authority’s crackdown on crypto-related activities. Earlier, reports had emerged regarding the platform banning news user registration. Today, Huobi went on to confirm the news with the latest press release announcing the same to comply with local laws and regulations.

The post revealed that Huobi Global had ceased account registration for new users in Mainland China from the 24th of September. The exchange plans to gradually retire the user accounts from the region by the end of this year, i.e., by 31st Dec 2021. It also ensured the safety of users’ funds.

Huobi’s concluded,

“We will inform users of the specific arrangements and details through official announcements, e-mails, text messages, etc. Huobi Global has always been dedicated to offering digital asset trading services and ensuring the safety of customer assets while following all applicable laws. We apologize for any inconvenience caused and thank you for your understanding and support!”

After Huobi, will OKEx and Binance follow suit?

Following Huobi’s exit, the Chinese crypto ecosystem will witness a significant setback. Shortly after the People’s Bank of China [PBoC] published a notice that called for extensively stricter restrictions on crypto trading, the entire market took a hit. The latest move by Huobi, which happens to be one of the largest crypto exchanges that cater to mainland China customers, signifies that there is no challenging the authorities this time.

The notice, co-signed by ten agencies, stated that any entity conducting crypto trades would be subject to legal prosecution. This also encompasses those individuals and entities who reside in China but operate off-shore crypto platforms that offer service to the country.

As yet, neither Binance nor OKEx have notified their users about any possible changes in terms of registrations. However, the bigger question is, will the two rival crypto exchanges follow suit and succumb to the growing pressure by the Chinese authorities? The crypto market is currently trading in a tight rangebound. If the crypto exchanges happen to cave in, the market may witness fresh sell-offs in the near future.

Huobi’s decline in market share coincides with rise in Binance’s

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The Chinese crackdown on cryptocurrency-related activities has had a serious impact. As a result, Huobi, which happens to be one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the country, has been introducing stricter restrictions on its platform.

Due to concerns surrounding regulatory policies in China, in order to protect the interests of investors,Huobi had temporarily stopped a major chunk of services in derivatives trading such as futures contracts, exchange-traded products and other leveraged investment products to new users.

This, in turn, has facilitated exposure to other global exchanges as Chinese users now look for alternatives. Binance, for one, may see an influx of new users from the region. Along the same line, the well-known crypto journalist, Colin Wu, speculated,

“Huobi, China’s largest exchange, is afraid of regulation and actively restricts future functions, causing users to go to Binance. Binance’s futures trading volume has surpassed that of other exchanges. However, Binance may be too large to face a similar situation like derivatives exchange Bybit, that is, governments of various countries have successively warned and cracked down.”

Skew

Huobi’s diminishing market share in derivatives realm

For a long time, Huobi has battled to clinch the supremacy title in the country. Meanwhile, OKEx, which happens to be another exchange, has dominated the derivatives scene but Huobi, for the most part of 2020, remained tied with the long-standing giant BitMEX. In recent times, however, the market dynamics have changed considerably. While Binance always had more futures volume than Huobi, Wu pointed that the rise in the former’s market share coincided with the decline in the latter’s market share.

According to the latest charts compiled by data provider Skew, Binance was ranked number one, and has dwarfed other derivatives exchanges in terms of Bitcoin futures volume as well open interest [OI], closely trailing behind was OKEx. Huobi, on the other hand, slipped to the fourth position in terms of BTC futures volume and was ranked sixth in respect to BTC open interest.

OKEx To Soon Lift The Suspension On Withdrawals; OKB Token Price Surges Over 18%

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October would go down as a spiteful month for the crypto-verse, especially for the members of BitMEX and OKEx. While BitMEX was drowning in troubled waters for the negligence of anti-money laundering and KYC procedures, OKEx, however, put a hold on its operations. After being subject to a loss, the exchange’s native cryptocurrency was seen surging by a huge margin following a rumor pertaining to the exchange.

OKEx’s Token Surges Following Rumors Around Release Of Founder Xu

Last month, prominent cryptocurrency exchange, OKEx announced that it was enforcing a temporary ban on withdrawals as a private key holder that was part of an investigation with a public security bureau was out of touch with the exchange. Soon after this news surfaced in the crypto-verse, rumors about the exchange’s founder, Mingxing Xu being taken away by the police was widely reported by the crypto media. All of this caused immense damage to the reputation of the exchange as well as its native token, OKB. The token recorded a slump of over 30% post the rumors. However, things seem to have taken a turn for the exchange.

A Chinese crypto reporter, Wu Blockchain, tweeted about the status quo of the probe pertaining to the exchange. Wu Blockchain revealed that the founder of the exchange had garnered “some freedom”. The tweet read,

Right after the news of the founder’s release took over Crypto-Twitter, the price of the OKB token went on an uphill journey. At the time of writing, the price of the OKB token had pushed past $5.72 with a whopping 18.46% surge over the last 24-hours.

OKEx

This was followed by another set of tweets that revealed the CEO of OKEx, Jay Hao’s Weibo post. The post shed light on the course of the ban on withdrawals in the exchange. Hao pointed out that there would be 100% reserves to withdraw and the progress would be announced soon. Hao went on to tweet about the same and urged users to stay patient for the official announcement. His tweet read,

“Please stay tuned for the official announcement! We guarantee that all user funds on OKEx remain safe & unaffected, 100% of funds can be withdrawn after withdrawals are resumed on @OKEx”

Huobi’s Deleted Tweets Sparks Fresh Rumors

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Trouble for the cryptocurrency exchange Huobi does not appear to fade away. Hours after the platform dismissed rumors that a senior executive was arrested by the Chinese authorities, Colin Wu, the crypto reporter who originally broke the news, further claimed to have confirmed from multiple sources that the platform’s COO Zhu Jiawei was, in fact, under police investigation.

His tweet read,

“He is the number two player in Huobi. Huobi is the exchange with most Chinese users and the largest Bitcoin stock in the world. Li Lin, the founder of Huobi, is unknown.”

Huobi and OKEx Incident Tied?

Wu went on to assert that Huobi was entangled in the same “Shanxi case” involved in the OKEx founder, Mingxing “Star” Xu. However, the crypto exchange has allegedly “conducted plans and drills after the Xu incident, so it may not stop withdrawing after being under pressure” like it happened with OKEx, tweeted Wu.

In yet another interesting turn of events, the crypto exchange had previously tweeted the statement below, however, the tweets have been deleted by the platform shortly thereafter. The only tweet that was still up was the notification stating that the platform was operating normally.

“All of Huobi’s management team members have been accounted for and have not been detained or arrested. We understand that the spread of false information can lead to concerns about the safety of user assets, but please rest assured your assets are safe.”

Huobi

The above-attached picture is a snapshot of the cryptocurrency exchange’s original clarification post which came hours after Wu’s claim. This news apparently triggered “panic” across the Chinese market. Furthermore, the reporter had also claimed that Huobi’s Founder and CEO, Jun Du allegedly noted that all user assets were safe and that everything was operating fine.

HT Token Takes a Plunge

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Its native token HT has been hit the hardest. The coin took a substantial plunge as the news of the exchange’s exec being investigated broke. The steep decline in HT’s value following the episode took a brief respite, however, it failed to retain the level as it depreciated to levels not seen since April 2020.

The token was trading at $3.63 after sliding by nearly 19% over the last 48-hours.

OKEx Lifts Temporary Ban On P2P Trading For Its Asian Currencies

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Several crypto exchanges were on the bad side of regulators this October. BitMEX and OKEx were one of the most popular exchanges that made a lot of news. While BitMEX was being slapped with more lawsuits, OKEx had commenced P2P trading for a few currencies.

Chinese, Indian and Vietnamese Currencies Find Leeway On OKEx

In a recent announcement titled, “Resumption of P2P Trading”, OKEx revealed that all trading activities would commence on the exchange from 21 October 2020 post 12:00 PM [UTC]. The platform revealed that the peer-to-peer trading wing for the Indian rupee, the Chinese yuan as well as the Vietnamese dong would be opened.

Just last week the exchange put a halt on its withdrawals following an investigation that was underway. The previous announcement suggested that a private key holder was working with a public security bureau and the exchange had reportedly been “out of touch” with the private key holder. While the details pertaining to the investigation was not disclosed by the exchange, OKEx suggested that the ban on withdrawals was temporary. This ban was enforced keeping in mind the security of the users.

Just yesterday, OKEx shared a tweet pointing out the ban of several accounts following security issues. The tweet read,

“Multiple accounts have triggered our risk management system. As a result, those accounts have been automatically banned for internal transfers. To ensure the safety of your assets, we’d like to remind users not to engage in unauthorized platforms.

Your funds are safe @OKEx”

Furthermore, the Head of Marketing who goes by the Twitter user name, Molly highlighted that certain users on the crypto exchange were persistent about taking their funds out. She added, “people been selling their USDT on OKEx with 15~20% price off. (the withdrawal is close, but transfer between OKEx users is still available.)”

Additionally, BitMEX seems to have taken its recent charges and arrests quite seriously as the exchange was implementing verification processes for its users that included KYC procedures. Users were reportedly required to complete the verification process before 5 November 2020. Users who fail to do so would be banned from withdrawing their funds after 4 December 2020.

OKEx’s Fiasco With Chinese Authorities Continue to Haunt OKB

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The OKEx drama has dragged its native utility token, OKB ‘s price to fall to levels not seen since March of this year. OKEx happens to be one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. The Platform’s announcement of a temporary suspension of withdrawals triggered a massive drop in the price of the token, which showed no sign of stopping it.

Over the past week, OKB underwent a decline of nearly 30% from $6.15 to the press time price of $4.31. The latest plunge essentially indicated the fears of many investors that have so far failed to calm down.

OKEx CEO Jay Hao took to Twitter to reassure the community members and tweeted

“All your funds and assets are safe.”

Despite this, the price of the native token continued to suffer, even as the rest of the crypto market recovered after a minor plunge.   According to the Crypto Analytical Platform, Glassnode, approximately 200,000 BTCs or 1.1% of the total circulating Bitcoin supply is currently held in OKEx wallets, which amounted to almost $2.3 billion worth of BTC stored in the exchange vaults.

It is important to note that since OKEx happens to be a global exchange, a quick sell-off was expected. However, this was short-lived as the market rebounded. Interestingly, space has been showing significant resilience to big news affecting it. Kucoin hack or the Bitfinex drama has so far failed to sway the price movement which was a positive development for the industry that has been historically influenced by FUDs and FOMOs.

Chinese cops-OKEx Fiasco

On the 16th of October, OKEx informed suspending crypto and digital assets withdrawals. Following this, the platform revealed that it had lost contact with one of its private key holders who was “co-operating” in a Chinese government investigation. According to a report by Caixin, which happens to be a China state-affiliated media platform, the Founder of OKEx and one of the exchange’s private key holders, Xu Mingxing had been taken by police at least a week ago.

The team’s official statement read,

“One of our private key holders is currently cooperating with a public security bureau in investigations where required. We have been out of touch with the concerned private key holder. As such, the associated authorization could not be completed. Pursuant to 8.1 Service Change and Interruption of the Terms of Service, OKEx may change the Service and/or may also interrupt, suspend or terminate the service at any time with or without prior notice.”

OKEx has not come up with any more updates since the official announcement last week.

Cryptocurrency Exchange Bitrue Hit by a DDoS Attack

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The digital asset management platform, Bitrue suffered a distributed denial-of-service [DDoS] attack on 20th September. This led to the web services on the platform being unavailable. Bitrue further revealed that a few app functions that rely on web services were also affected.

Its official tweet read,

The platform also revealed that there were “no lasting effects” of the attack and confirmed that all the funds were safe.

Additionally, in February this year, OKEx and Bitfinex suffered multiple sophisticated assaults of DDoS attacks. The first attack on OKEx routed nearly 200 gigabytes per second of traffic. In less than 24-hours another denial attack followed, this time on Bitfinex, which put a strain on the platform’s activity. During the same OKEx was hit with a second attack by the bad actors routing 400 gigabytes per second of traffic.

Cryptocurrency exchanges weren’t the only targets of DDoS attacks. Nearly a month ago, the New Zealand stock exchange was hit by a DDoS attack which led to a series of outages as a result of targeted disruption by cybercriminals who demanded Bitcoin in order to cease the attack.

 A quick primer: 

DDoS attack is a method of disruption on the Internet and does not require much sophistication or effort. By overloading a target with bogus traffic, a malicious actor is able to make a website or service unavailable. One of the many reasons as to why this is done could potentially be for the purpose of suspending trading in order to achieve some kind of pricing advantage.

Upon analyzing some of the DDoS attacks hitting the many cryptocurrency exchanges on CloudFlare network in order to gauge any visible patterns of interest, the eb-infrastructure and website-security company found that the prominent volume of DDoS traffic originated from SSDP amplification attacks, NTP amplification attacks, and application-layer attacks.

While most cryptocurrency exchanges have been able to recover from the impact of a Distributed Denial of Service attacks within a single day, however, with trading coming to a complete halt due to it essentially implies that a long-lasting DDoS attack could severely affect the revenues of the platform.

OKEx’s Jay Hao Accuses Binance’s CZ Of Endorsing Dubious DeFi Projects

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The crypto-verse is home to thousands of projects, while many of them enter the market with the intention of making use of technology to contribute to the growth of the ecosystem, a few others aim at extracting money from people. These scammy projects are sometimes wrongly endorsed by prominent personalities of the crypto industry, Binance’s Changpeng Zhao seems to be the latest one to join the list.

OKEx CEO Calls Out Binance For “Irresponsible Behaviour”

Malta-based cryptocurrency exchange, Binance has been touted as the world’s largest crypto exchange following the array of developments and partnerships, the platform dives into. However, Binance’s quick-wittedness seems to have caused a problem, suggests Jay Hao, the CEO of prominent crypto exchange, OKEx. Recently, in an array of tweets, the CEO of OKEx called out CZ for endorsing certain scammy DeFi projects.

In his tweets, Hao pointed out that Binance Smart Chain [BSC] was an extremely centralized platform. The platform’s venture, BakerySwap reportedly caused protests across China and other places for collapsing in less than 12 hours. He tweeted,

The DeFi boom is hard to miss, with several platforms pouring into space. Binance hopped onto the DeFi bandwagon by listing several DeFi tokens. Binance was quick enough to list SUSHI and Hao criticized Zhao, CEO, for doing so.His tweet read,

“Those financial losses are a result of blind trust in #Binance. Despite @heyibinance’s claims that projects on BSC must pass all security audits, $BAKE still plunged leading @cz_binance to delete his BakerySwap endorsement tweet ytd just like he did with #SushiSwap previously.”

Furthermore, labeling Binance’s latest move as “irresponsible” indicated that it depleted the trust of the crypto community and damaged DeFi ‘s reputation. Ironically, OKEx listed SUSHI on the same day as Binance. Hao added,

“Trust is hard to build but easy to tear down. For the sake of users’ interests & #Crypto development, pls stop these tricks and #BUILD the real #DeFi.”

Additionally, the DeFi space was seen recovering from its latest slump, despite the crackdown of several faulty projects. At the time of writing, a total of 9.36 billion USD was locked in the DeFi space with Uniswap prolonging its dominance by 19.10%

OKEx Renames its Public Chain OKExChain; Aims for EVM Compatibility

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Cryptocurrency spot and derivatives exchange, OKEx announced that its public OKChain chain has been officially renamed OKExChain. The Cosmos SDK-based public chain, developed by OKEx, supports a number of decentralized [dApps] applications and allows users to issue their own cryptocurrencies, create trading pairs, and trade freely on them. Its multi-chain structure has significantly boosted the efficiency and scale of application development.

In addition, the latest monthly progress report revealed that the OKExChain testnet has been upgraded to v0.11.1.

Commenting on the development, OKEx CEO Jay Hao stated

“We are very confident in the technical strength of OKEx. Throughout our extensive testing, OKExChain has shown very high performance with all the necessary elements of a decentralized public chain.”

The exec also went on to add that,

“Decisions such as whether to enable open node elections, commit to open source, or have governance tokens are indispensable elements of a public chain. So, this is also the easiest way to judge whether a ‘public chain’ is truly public or just a pseudo-public chain.”

The Malta-based platform announced the launch of OKExChain in February this year to support the community with more decentralized applications. This was followed by the OKEx DEX roll-out, which happens to be the first decentralized OKExChain-based application.

In April, OKExChain became the first exchange-developed public chain to become a 100% open-source, where each individual could become a validator node, and even the parent organization OKEx does not have the ability to control the public chain.

In addition, OKEx also claimed that its public chain could process more TPS than the Ethereum blockchain and has reportedly already cooperated with over 60 ecosystem partners, including the public chain, PoS mining pool, explorer, wallet, and other key components of the crypto industry.

In the coming days, OKExChain aims to become EVM-compatible and support all existing Ethereum smart contracts, making it easy for developers to move their decentralized applications to the new chain.

Crypto Derivatives Volume Soar to Fresh ATH in August; Catalyzed by Bitcoin’s Rally Above $12,000

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While the lack of positive jurisdiction may have driven the cryptocurrency industry into a gray area, but the derivatives sector has come to the rescue. It has undoubtedly driven a new cycle of crypto adoption.

The crypto industry has seen developments on various fronts and thanks to the foray of many institutional investors, space has matured significantly from narratives such as ‘Wild West’ or another ‘dot-com bubble’.

Over the past few years, crypto derivatives have played an important role and this was evident in its soaring trading volumes. According to the latest Exchange Review report by CryptoCompare, derivatives volume has soared to a fresh all-time high in August.

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Trading volumes of derivatives surged by a staggering 53.6% in August driving the figures to a massive $711.7 billion. With this, the trading volume surpassed the previous high of May when it registered $602 billion in monthly volumes.

Along with the derivatives, volumes for spot also increased by 49.6% taking its figures to $944.9 billion in August. Interestingly, this month saw a period of high volatility coupled with Bitcoin’s price movement climbing to the 2020-peak above $12,300. This could have potentially triggered the surge of trading volume as trading activity in derivatives as well as their underlying cryptocurrencies intensified.

This was a promising sign of the market maturing as institutional investors remained overall optimistic despite several pullbacks.

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Besides, derivatives exchanges also saw a significant increase in trading volume in August, according to the report. Huobi dominated the chart with a trading volume of $208.5 billion after rose by 44.7%.

Next in the line was OKEx, which was up by 69.1% and reported a volume of $190.8 billion following Binance with $184.6 billion volume traded after surging by 74% in August. In addition, BitMEX traded $72.5 billion and registered an increase of 43.6%.

The report further noted,

“Trading activity remained high in August compared to July. The top 4 exchanges Huobi, OKEx, Binance and BitMEX represented 90% of the volume traded throughout the month.”

Monthly CME futures contract volumes have also noted a substantial uptick of 36.3% since July as it touched 203,867 contracts traded in August. Additionally, another institutional investing platform, Bakkt recently surpassed its highest-ever figure of $147 million in volume with 12,791 contracts traded on 25th August as previously reported by TWJ.