Huobi to Delist Tokens Trading With Justin Sun’s USDD

The cryptocurrency exchange Huobi has announced plans to delist ten trading pairs on Monday. But not just any tokens. Primarily, those trading with Justin Sun’s USDD will become unavailable as of June 29. Huobi said the changes were part of offering its users “a better trading experience.” But did Sun’s public accusations against the brother of the exchange’s founder play a role?

According to a Bloomberg report, the trading pairs with USDD included Solana’s SOL, Cardano’s ADA, ApeCoin’s APE, Polygon’s MATIC, Filecoin’s FIL, and Ethereum Classic’s ETC tokens. USDD is a stablecoin issued by the community-governed TRON DAO Reserve. Currently, it is the seventh largest stablecoin by market capitalization, according to CoinMarketCap.

The Delisting Follows Recent SEC Action

The decision is no surprise to those who have followed the public spat between Sun and Huobi. In a statement on its website, Huobi urged customers to go with alternatives. It stated:

“Please choose other related trading pairs for transactions if you hold any assets in ADA, APE, ARPA, ETC, FIL, GAS, MATIC, QTUM, SOL and ZKS. Please cancel pending orders of the above trading pairs in a timely manner. Once the trading pairs are removed, pending orders will be cancelled automatically, and assets will be automatically returned to your Spot account.”

The move follows the recent classification of most of the tokens as securities. Earlier this month, in the agency’s lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase, the United States SEC designated 19 cryptos as securities. These included ADA, SOL, and MATIC.

In the United States, it is illegal to operate as an unregistered securities exchange. In a sign of growing anxiety about the classification, other trading platforms, including Robinhood and eToro, have already removed support for some of the tokens.

Justin Sun Accused Huobi Founder’s Brother of Acquiring Tokens Abnormally

Not all has been well between the Sun and Huobi lately. Last month, Sun, who is also a Global Advisor at Huobi, as well as the founder of Tron (TRX), accused Li Wei, the brother of Huobi’s founder, of obtaining free amounts of Huobi’s native token (HT) through “abnormal means.”

What was Li Wei supposedly up to? Sun suggested in a May 17 Twitter thread that the brother had made no real contributions to the Huobi community. Despite this, Li Wei was able to accumulate significant wealth by repeatedly selling the tokens. Hence, Sun saw nepotism as well as inappropriate profiteering. The tweets have since been deleted.

Last week, Sun transferred a large amount of money to Huobi Exchange. According to data from Arkham Intelligence, Sun unstaked and then sent 15,815 ETH, equivalent to $29.7 million, to Huobi through an intermediary address. The funds originated from the staking platform Lido Finance.

This was widely interpreted as an aggressive move against Lido. However, the rumor fell apart when it emerged that he had almost 290,000 ETH, worth nearly $546 million, still staked in the platform.