Sam Bankman-Fried Says FTX Will Not Buy Huobi Global

FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried said today that his cryptocurrency exchange is not planning to acquire Huobi Global. 

Huobi Global is a popular cryptocurrency exchange, with a 24-hour trading volume of $624 million, according to CoinGecko data, making it one of the world’s largest. 

Earlier this month, a Bloomberg report claimed ​​Huobi Group founder Leon Li was in talks to sell his majority stake in the crypto exchange. The report said Sam Bankman-Fried and Tron founder Justin Sun were among the interested investors talking with Li. 

But today crypto billionaire Bankman-Fried said his company wasn’t planning to buy the exchange. “Just to be explicit because apparently a lot of people are saying this: No, we are not planning to acquire Huobi,” he said in a Monday tweet. 

Huobi has been hit hard by the bear market, with reports claiming the exchange was planning to significantly cut down its staff. 

FTX is one of the world’s biggest crypto derivative exchanges. It specializes in the world of futures: investing in contracts that bet on the future price of cryptocurrencies, rather than buying assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum outright. 

It is also one of the largest spot trading exchanges in the world and overtook Coinbase in terms of volume for the first time earlier this year. The company, which makes it money by charging fees on every trade, grew its revenue by more than 1,000% in 2021, according to a CNBC report last week.

Sam Bankman-Fried has come to the rescue of a number of crypto currencies during the bear market—giving $750 million to crypto lenders BlockFi and Voyager after they went bust. The CEO told Decrypt earlier this month that he thought it was “disappointing” more industry players haven’t “stepped up” in the same way.