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A year can make all the difference in the criss-of-the-money world of crypto-currencies.
In early 2018, the Chinese group Huobi offered a senior executive the highest end-of-year bonus of 300 bitcoins, worth about US $ 3 million at the time. Now, the digital badet swap lets people go, after bitcoin plunged 80% from its peak.
However, although Livio Weng Xiaoqi, CEO of Huobi Global, the company's main trading company, remains profitable every month, even though trading volumes have been reduced by one-tenth of its record at one point.
"We do not know how long the bear market will last, so it's still possible that we were struggling to survive," Weng said in an interview at his Beijing office. "We must plan ahead and spend money carefully.
He declined to specify Huobi's revenue, but said that it is mainly generated by transaction fees.
Trade is among the first and most obvious victims of the protracted bear market of crypto-currencies, which have erased more than $ 600 billion of the total value of some 2,000 digital chips since January 2018, according to data from CoinMarketCap, which clbadify crypto-currencies according to their market value.
Last year's collapse in the market was attributed to the bursting of a bubble in the initial coin offerings (ICO), a largely unregulated participatory financing method involving digital currency, as well as the "fork" in bitcoin money, which resulted in a split of the fourth. the largest cryptocurrency in two separate entities due to fundamental disagreements between its developers.
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The crisis of cryptocurrency has begun to be felt. Leading companies like Bitmain, based in Beijing, the world's largest manufacturer of specialized computers used to create new digital money units, and Switzerland-based software production studio ConsenSys, have all announced a plan dismissal.
While Huobi is still looking to expand its core business of trading, which accounts for over 70% of its total business turnover, the company is downsizing in deficit units such as venture financing and equity. 39, aggregation of news, according to Weng.
Earlier this month, Huobi closed its subsidiary in Shenzhen, which hired about 30 people to research and create new applications. The application of new Huobi Info is no longer maintained by only a few employees, while it was a few dozen. In total, the company still employs 1,300 people worldwide, having cut about 100 jobs in recent weeks, Weng said.
Chinese Bitmain Technology and Huobi plan layoffs as cryptocurrency problems begin to be felt
Founded in 2013, Huobi was at one time the world's largest trading bitcoin exchange, with the platform offering no transaction fees to attract risk-averse Chinese retail investors. In September 2017, the ban on cryptocurrency transactions imposed by Beijing forced Huobi to migrate its trading activities to Singapore.
According to CoinMarketCap, Huobi manages a daily trading volume of US $ 370 million, about half of the transactions on the main Binance exchange.
More than 70% of Huobi Global users are Chinese living outside China or using a VPN service, judging by the language settings of their user interface. They are followed by Russian speakers and English speakers, said Weng.
"Our main advantage over our competitors is that we have licenses in all major countries, and we are the only one of the world's leading markets," said Weng.
Regulators around the world are gearing up to regulate cryptocurrency trading, especially when they are trading in real money. In addition to its main digital badet trading platform, Huobi has obtained licenses to operate fiat-to-crypto exchanges in markets including the United States, Japan and Europe. By way of comparison, Binance has left the United States and Japan due to regulatory concerns and has spread to smaller nations like Malta and Uganda.
How has China's crackdown allowed Binance to become the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world?
"Despite their success abroad, I think it would be very difficult for them [Huobi] local competition with US exchanges, "said Joyce Yang, founder of Global Coin Research, based in New York, which focuses on the cryptocurrency space of Asia.
"They can have a very successful business focused on Asia and China, and they should really double up there," Yang said. "But in the trading space, everyone is trying to protect themselves and compare themselves to each other."
Huobi rolled out a new platform for futures in December to challenge OKEx and BitMEX, and claims to have accumulated more than $ 20 billion in trading volume in a month.
The company released earlier this month a new application called Huobi Chat, which combines a cryptocurrency portfolio and an instant messaging application. Its goal is to attract a million users in the first 50 days of its launch. The red banners hanging over Huobi's offices in Beijing remind employees of this target and describe them as an "iron army".
In the end, such efforts require "a window of opportunity, another victory, to pay," said Weng.
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