Sam Bankman-Fried & Justin Sun to Buy Majority of Huobi Global Exchange?

Leon Li, the founder of Huobi Global, is in talks with investors for selling his majority stakes in the crypto-exchange with a valuation of more than $3 billion, as reported by Bloomberg.

It is estimated that this could be one of the biggest deals ever in the crypto industry since the $2 trillion crypto rout began. According to CoinGecko, Huobi is one of the largest crypto exchanges with a daily trade volume of over $1 billion. 

Li is seeking to sell roughly 60 percent of the company and has held preliminary talks with Tron founder Justin Sun and FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, the report stated, citing people familiar with the matter. 

The existing investors of the company including ZhenFund and Sequoia China were informed about Li’s decision during the July shareholders’ meeting. It is estimated that the deal might be concluded by the end of this month. Li is seeking a valuation of $2 billion – $3 billion, implying the stake sale could fetch upwards of $1 billion. 

If concluded it will be one of the biggest deals in the crypto industry, keeping in mind the “crypto winter”. With the crypto market spiraling down, many big firms were forced to cut costs and jobs, whereas this will be the first instance where a majority stake will be sold by one of the biggest crypto firms. 

Huobi was one of the most active Bitcoin trading platforms on the globe, but it had to retreat from China which was once its biggest user base and revenue source. After Beijing declared crypto-transactions illegal last year, Li’s company stopped providing services to Chinese users. 

Huobi has roughly handled $1.12 billion of crypto transactions over the 24 hrs to August 12, a little more than half of the trades hosted by Coinbase Global Inc., according to CoinGecko. 

After Bloombergs’ report was published, Huobi’s native token HT saw an increase of 25 percent to $5.43, hitting a high of $5.80 at one point.