FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried Denies Crypto Exchange Is Planning to Acquire Huobi

FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried said in a tweet Monday morning the crypto exchange had no plans to acquire Huobi. Huobi is one of the world's largest crypto exchanges, with a daily trading volume of over $1 billion, according to data from CoinGecko.

• Speculation had been growing that FTX – which has extended financial lifelines to several troubled crypto companies including exchange BlockFi and lender Voyager Digital and could eventually acquire both firms – was planning to acquire the Seychelles-based Huobi.
• In mid-August, Bloomberg reported that FTX had held preliminary talks with Huobi founder Leon Li to buy a majority stake in Huobi that would value the firm at $3 billion or more. The report said that a deal could be completed as soon as the end of this month, and that Justin Sun, founder of the Tron blockchain network, was also interested in bidding on the stake. Sun denied any interest in a tweet.
• Earlier this year, FTX bought Japanese exchange Liquid and also agreed to acquire Canadian trading platform Bitvo. FTX was also reported to be interested in acquiring no-fee trading app Robinhood, but Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said in early August he liked his company as a standalone firm.
• Huobi’s native token HT declined about 6% following Bankman-Fried’s tweet.

Read more: FTX Could Buy BlockFi for Only $15M – or a Lot More If Crypto Lender Hits Big Goals

UPDATE (August 29, 16:37 UTC): Added details about Robinhood.