Two weeks after suspending client withdrawals and five weeks after raising $80 million in fresh funding, troubled crypto lender Babel Finance is losing multiple top employees.
One is Yulong Liu, head of global partnerships, who plans to leave by the end of this month or early next month.
Liu frequently represented Babel at public events. He recently updated LinkedIn to say he left Babel this month and has since deleted his profile.
Liu worked for Babel Finance for nearly three years. As head of partnerships, he focused on getting new partners for the firm, including depositors and borrowers.
Founded in 2018, Hong Kong-based Babel Finance provides lending and trading services to a claimed 500 institutional clients.
The firm recently said it had outstanding loan balance of more than $3 billion at the end of 2021, with an average monthly trading volume of $800 million in derivatives.
On June 17, Babel suspended client withdrawals because of “unusual liquidity pressures.”
Three days later, the firm said it had reached “preliminary agreements on the repayment period of some debts” with major counterparties and customers, “which has eased the company’s short-term liquidity pressure.”
Liu is just one of the multiple people leaving Babel amid the firm’s troubles. Several others from the partnerships team that Liu led have also departed.
These people are: Sean Yang, director of global partnerships; Xavier Xiang, another director of global partnerships; and Yuchen Jiang, who worked in an unspecified partnership role. Yang, Xiang and Jiang all worked for less than a year at Babel, according to their profiles.
Babel has also lost people from its PR and communications team. These include its director of communications, Jacynth Wang, and Yiwei Wang, the firm’s global PR lead.
Jacynth joined Babel three months ago and Yiwei worked there for over two years, per their LinkedIn profiles.
