Huobi & Kucoin Delist Failing Altcoins as Crypto Markets Drop

As cryptocurrency markets continue to struggle, a number of exchanges have purged themselves of struggling altcoins, according to a new report from Bitcoin.com.

One of these exchanges, Kucoin, published an announcement this week explaining that a number of tokens, including Bread, WePower, Bitclave, and Ethlend, were “disqualified” from listing following the failure to meet the exchange’s listing requirements.

Kucoin is quite far down on the list in terms of its trading volume–Coinmarketcap lists it as the 54th-largest exchange in the world. However, Huobi (the third-largest exchange in the world by volume) recently announced that around 30 altcoins were placed on a probationary list and may be removed from the platform because of chronically low trading volume.

Among the affected tokens are SALT, STN, Tierion (TNT), Utrust (UTK), WePower (WPR), XMax (XMX), ZJLT, and Zilla (ZLA).

#Huobi Adds ‘Delisting Risk Warning’ to 32 #DigitalAssets Over Low #TradingVolumehttps://t.co/KlR9hLFwso

— Huobi MENA (@HuobiMENA) December 25, 2018

“In order to promote the healthy development of the blockchain industry and protect the legitimate rights and interests of investors, Huobi regularly carries out comprehensive reviews of the listed tokens in accordance with the Token Administration Regulations of Huobi,” the exchange said in a statement.

Crypto Markets Continue in Death-Drop
Both announcements come amidst news of cryptocurrency prices that seem to be in an endless free-fall–the bear market that has plagued most cryptocurrencies throughout 2018 seems to be relentlessly pushing prices down through the year’s end.

Take Bitcoin, for example–over the last 24 hours, the price of BTC has fallen roughly 4 percent, and as CCN reported, “when the Bitcoin price is as high as it is, a single percentage point is worth more than $30, so even a shift of 2% is notable.” At the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading at roughly $3640 per coin.

Some analysts have theorized that the most recent downturn has been fueled by the fact that 25,000 Bitcoin options are scheduled to expire on Deribit tomorrow, December 28th.

Tomorrow is the largest expiry of the year for bitcoin options – the “Dec expiry”. 25,500 bitcoin options will expire on Deribit ~ nearly $100mln of notional. 80% of options expiring are calls. Open interest below will mechanically drop by more than 50%. pic.twitter.com/wNmH3eOZBT

— skew (@skew_markets) December 27, 2018

Even if this theory is true, Bitcoin isn’t the only popular cryptocurrency to be suffering. At the time of writing, Ripple was down 5.3 percent and Ethereum was down 6.4 percent.