What's Driving Token Prices? January 11, 2023

HT/TRX (-7% and +1.4%) - Late last week the rumor mill began flying on Twitter that centralized exchange Huobi was experiencing issues following reported layoffs (about 20%), a shutdown of staff internal communications channels, and massive withdrawals from the exchange. In response to the instability, Justin Sun, the founder of layer-1 blockchain Tron and an owner/board member of Huobi, transferred $100m in stablecoins of his own money to Huobi in a move to instill confidence in the exchange. It is unclear if the internal issues have been resolved but Huobi has seen over $100m in outflows in the last 7 days.
LOOKS (+3.2%) - NFT marketplace Looksrare has been struggling significantly as of late since the launch of rival marketplace Blur. The LooksRare founder posted an announcement yesterday regarding the V2 launch of the protocol which will include an aggregator and mobile platform. It will also be adding utility to $LOOKS via payments, mint opportunities, and more. While NFT trading volumes have fallen significantly since their highs in February 2022, they posted $1.1b in total volume in December with Blur commanding 47% of that volume while Looksrare has slipped to 11%.
GALA (+112%) - Blockchain-based gaming project Gala Games has soared in the last week after what many thought was a simple short squeeze. In fact the project has had several positive announcements the past few days including hiring the ex-head designer of Farmville, acquiring a mobile gaming studio with 20m users, and would be shifting their tokenomics model from “play-to-earn” to more of a gas fee model.

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