Amber Group Purchases Singaporean Crypto Exchange Sparrow

According to a report published (1) in The Business Times that cites regulatory documents, the Asian cryptocurrency investment company Amber Group has bought the Singaporean cryptocurrency exchange Sparrow.

The move by Amber is unexpected, given the issues that have been raised regarding the firm's financial stability. In the most recent few months, it has made substantial attempts to cut costs, including laying off employees and pulling back from abroad activities in places such as the United Kingdom and the United States.

According to Annabelle Huang, managing partner at Amber, the company went through a period of rapid expansion in the previous year, reaching a peak headcount of approximately 1,100 employees. According to a report that was published by Bloomberg last week, that number has since been reduced to somewhere about 400.

According to the data provided by Crunchbase (2), the cryptocurrency exchange was established in 2018 and has successfully raised a total of $14.2 million.

It was announced in August that it had secured a Major Payment Institution license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore, which allowed the startup company to provide digital payment token services in Singapore. This was made possible by the company's acquisition of the license.

Huang indicated that "Amber will continue to support our global HNW [high net worth] and institutional clients." Because this is where the majority of our resources are located as well as the location of our headquarters, Asia has traditionally been considered to be our primary market.

Amber was established in 2017, and since then, it has provided various services to institutional clients. These services include trading, liquidity, and yield products. WhaleFin, the company's wealth management platform, was recently introduced to the consumer market as part of its expansion efforts.

Issues at Amber's

Today, Bloomberg reported (3) that Amber would be eliminating bonuses and lowering executive wages as part of the cost-cutting measures that the company would be taking.

Amber has been working on trying to raise further funding, to raise $100 million at a valuation of $3 billion for the company as a whole. The Amber agreement is expected to be disclosed in January, according to a report published in the Financial Times last week. The article stated that Amber had successfully secured $50 million of the $100 million.

On November 23, one of the company's co-founders, Tiantian Kullander, also known as TT, passed away while he was sleeping at the age of thirty. This tragic event only made Amber's predicament more difficult. In addition to this, it owes approximately $130 million to Darshan Bathija, the CEO of the failed cryptocurrency lender Vauld.