After at least three senior executives of the Huobi exchange involved in human resources, R&D and finance were confirmed to have been taken away by Chinese police for investigation, CoinDesk, a large cryptocurrency media, issued a rare analysis article warning that Huobi global consultant Justin Sun would welcome came to collapse, and accused Huobei of going bankrupt and closed down, and even suggested that Justin Sun used Huobei as a personal piggy bank. The media publicly retracted the article over the weekend, emphasizing that the anonymously written opinion piece contained personal attacks. Although the article has been deleted, it has not made any apology.
The title of the article published by CoinDesk directly pointed out "Is Justin Sun the next Do Kwon or Sam Bankman-Fried?" These two people are the founders of Terra Luna and FTX exchanges respectively. Now they are facing legal charges due to the "explosion" of the run. Setting such a title will obviously cause serious damage to Sun's reputation.
The media has changed the title to "Withdrawing the commentary article about Justin Sun" and pointed out in the text that an anonymously written opinion article contained personal attacks on Tron CEO Justin Sun, which should not be published.
“Retractions are almost unheard of for us,” CoinDesk editor-in-chief said. “Typically, if a story is inaccurate or doesn’t meet our standards, we simply and unapologetically correct the article, address the author or editor’s concerns, and move on.”
He stressed: "However, after reviewing our opinion pages, we found that an anonymous article about Justin Sun fell far short of these standards and we had to withdraw it. We firmly believe that individuals' privacy rights should be respected and hereby clearly state that we are against name searches. Therefore, we allow the use of anonymous sources and publish articles written under pseudonyms from time to time, but there is a very important warning that we cannot launch blatant personal attacks on others."
“Anyone, whether the CEO of a major blockchain or someone unknown to the public, deserves to know who is attacking their character in a public-facing outlet like CoinDesk. Given the nature of the article violates that standard, we were unable to simply correct the story and end it, we removed the entire story,” the editor-in-chief added.
However, other media still quote the article and it has not been deleted. The anonymous author quoted the news and wrote: "HuoBi executives are being questioned by Chinese police because the exchange has gone bankrupt and Sun Yuchen used the exchange as a personal piggy bank. Is this a familiar scene?"
He went on to criticize Justin Sun: “In the case of Tron, even the former CTO stated that the blockchain is centralized. In fact, he stated that the TRON project is centralized. Token distribution is centralized, super representatives are centralized, and code development is centralized. Worse, Justin Sun appears to have his own set of Tron network management keys and has been found to be using them. Therefore, this is Justin Sun’s Tron.”
He also mentioned that in Sun Yuchen's crypto ecosystem, things may become more complicated because there are many different entities, such as Huobi and Poloniex exchanges, that can create speculative assets, and many different blockchains, such as Tron and Huobi Echo Chain. Therefore, no matter where the token is issued on the chain, once it enters or moves out of any of these blockchain exchanges, it actually becomes a linked asset.
The author also warned that if the USDT stablecoin pegged to Tron completely loses trust, the situation will be serious. He mentioned: "In March, we felt this during the Huobi Token flash crash. At the same time, the Huobi exchange anchored tokens HBTC and HETH were completely insane and fell sharply at the same time. Now, correlation is not causation, and many people don’t notice this because the market value of HBTC and HETH is small, and the total locked value (TVL) of the Huobi ecosystem chain is also small, but you can feel the correlation of things in decentralized finance (DeFi)."
He concluded by saying, “Sun’s personality is roughly comparable to SBF and Do Kwon, and may actually cause more liquidations than any of them imagine.”
It should be emphasized that this article has been publicly withdrawn by CoinDesk, and an explanation of the deletion of the article is made in the text.
Wu Blockchain reported in early August that several CTOs, CHOs and other senior executives of a certain exchange in China were recently investigated by the Chinese police. The charge was the crime of opening a casino. In addition, some other exchanges were also investigated, and the founder of a third-tier exchange was also investigated. The scope was extremely wide. It may involve "providing fund payment and settlement services" for gaming websites and gaming programs.
Bitrace on-chain data research shows that in the past year, online gambling funds directly transferred to or indirectly linked to hot wallet addresses of mainstream trading platforms have exceeded 7.6 billion USDT stablecoins.
According to Techub News, at least three senior executives of Huobi were taken away by Chinese police for investigation, involving human resources, R&D, and finance. Some employees said they received an urgent notice asking them to leave the country as soon as possible.