What is HTX?

HTX is the exchange formerly known as Huobi, founded in 2013 by Leon Li and rebranded after About Capital, a fund associated with TRON founder Justin Sun, acquired it in 2022. Sun advises the company rather than holding a disclosed executive title, and that governance arrangement remains the platform's defining question. Scale is not in doubt, since HTX reported 59.49 million registered users and close to $900 billion in trading volume for the first half of the year.

Perpetual traders keep it on the shortlist for its 300+ perp pairs, 200x headline leverage, and a derivatives stack that survived a decade of market cycles, even if order book depth no longer rivals the top three venues it once stood beside.

HTX Perpetual Futures Fees

HTX charges 0.02% maker and 0.06% taker on USDT-margined perpetuals at the base Prime 0 tier, per the official fee page. Advancement through the eleven Prime tiers runs on three alternative inputs, 30-day trading volume, total account balance, or HTX token holdings, so a large static balance can qualify an account that trades lightly.

Prime 1 unlocks at $30,000 in 30-day volume or a $5,000 balance held over the prior day, trimming futures rates to 0.018% maker and 0.055% taker. The ladder ends near 0% maker and 0.025% taker, which demands 30-day futures turnover above roughly $1.5 billion. Paying fees in HTX or TRX shaves the bill further, and new accounts can lock in a standing reduction through our HTX referral code. Cost-sensitive traders can see how those numbers stack against the field in our lowest fee perpetual exchanges ranking.

How HTX Funding Rates Work

HTX assigns each perpetual its own funding interval of 8 hours, 4 hours, or 1 hour, published on the pair's contract details page, rather than applying one schedule platform-wide. BTCUSDT runs the standard 8-hour cycle settling at 00:00, 08:00, and 16:00 UTC, and live prints across every pair sit on our funding rates dashboard.

The rate formula follows the clamp model in HTX's funding documentation, taking the average premium index plus a bounded interest component of 0.01% per 8 hours, scaled down for shorter intervals and capped per pair. Settlement uses the index price rather than the mark. A detail worth flagging on a funding-data site is that cross-margin and isolated positions in the same contract are funded separately, and the rate keeps floating with the running premium average until the payment deadline, so the figure quoted mid-period is an estimate rather than a lock. Historical prints for the largest market live on our BTC perpetuals page.

HTX Perpetual Contract Types & Leverage

HTX runs one of the broader contract menus among centralized venues, pairing USDT-margined linear perpetuals with coin-margined inverse contracts of the kind covered in our inverse perpetuals explainer, plus dated delivery futures that most rivals have abandoned. The differences between those expiring products and perps are laid out in our perpetuals vs futures guide.

Leverage tops out at 200x on BTC and ETH and 125x on selected altcoins, governed by a tiered margin system that cuts available leverage as account equity and position size climb. Both cross and isolated modes are supported, and the platform layers copy trading and grid bots on top of the futures engine for traders who automate rather than click.

HTX TradFi & Commodity Perpetuals

HTX opened its TradFi Zone early this year with USDT-margined perpetuals on gold, silver, platinum, palladium, and crude oil, then expanded aggressively into US equities. By late May the lineup covered 75 assets and monthly TradFi volume had passed $1 billion, with 42 stock-linked contracts added in May alone, spanning NVDA, TSLA, META, AMD, JPM, leveraged ETF trackers like TQQQ and SQQQ, and the SPX500 index.

The most unusual entries are pre-IPO proxy contracts on SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, a corner of the market we map in our pre-market perpetuals guide. These products trade through the global HTX platform rather than any securities-licensed entity, so they deliver synthetic price exposure with typical leverage of 10x to 20x and no ownership claim on the underlying. How that approach compares across venues is covered in our best TradFi perpetual exchanges roundup.

HTX Licenses & Regulation

HTX's strongest authorization is a VARA registration in Dubai, sitting alongside its Seychelles corporate base and a handful of smaller approvals. The gaps outweigh the entries. HTX holds no MiCA CASP license, and its legacy Lithuanian VASP registration died with the transitional regime, so the exchange withdrew from the entire EU when the bloc's licensing deadline arrived on July 1, 2026. There is no US entity, no FCA permission, and no FinCEN registration.

On enforcement, HTX itself has avoided the headline settlements that rivals carry, and the SEC's market manipulation case that shadowed the brand targeted Justin Sun and his TRON entities personally, reaching a settlement early this year. The company's regulatory exposure is structural rather than punitive, resting on where it cannot operate instead of what it has paid. The full jurisdiction picture sits in our HTX restricted countries list.

Where is HTX Available?

HTX's blocked list approaches 40 jurisdictions once the EU bloc is counted, covering the United States, mainland China, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Canada, Japan, and sanctioned states, per the User Agreement. A separate derivatives-only list switches off perpetuals while leaving spot open in Taiwan, Israel, New Zealand, and a few other markets.

For derivatives specifically, the US is fully closed with no licensed pathway, and the EU went dark at the MiCA cutoff, leaving Asia, the CIS region, MENA, and Latin America as HTX's operating heartland. KYC is mandatory before funding or withdrawing, which places HTX at the opposite pole from the venues in our best no-KYC perpetual exchanges list, and blocked Canadian traders can find regulated substitutes in our Canadian futures platforms guide.

Is HTX Safe?

HTX has published Merkle tree Proof of Reserves for 45 consecutive months, one of the longest unbroken disclosure streaks in the industry, with the latest snapshot showing BTC at 103%, ETH at 100%, TRX at 105%, and SOL at 100%. Users can verify their own inclusion under Assets and PoR Reports. The composition deserves scrutiny, since a large share of reserves has historically sat in TRX and the HTX token, ecosystem assets whose value is tied to the same group that runs the exchange.

The hack record is real and disclosed. A hot wallet breach cost roughly $8 million in September 2023, followed that November by a $30 million exchange theft alongside an $86.6 million exploit of the affiliated Heco Bridge, and HTX reimbursed affected users while absorbing a $258 million net outflow after reopening. No verified insurance fund figure is published today. Custody relies on multi-signature cold storage, 2FA, and withdrawal whitelisting, and even a 45-month disclosure streak cannot take counterparty risk on a centralized venue to zero.

How Does HTX Compare to Other Perpetual Exchanges?

HTX's nearest structural peers are Gate and Bitget, Asia-facing venues with broad altcoin perp menus and thin Western licensing. Against them, HTX differentiates on product breadth, keeping delivery futures and coin-margined contracts alive while pushing the widest TradFi perp lineup of the three, pre-IPO proxies included. Against Binance, Bybit, and OKX, the gap runs the other way, since HTX's liquidity and open interest sit a full tier below and its governance opacity prices in a discount that no fee schedule offsets.

Positioning sentiment before entering an HTX trade is easier with cross-venue crowding data on our long/short ratio dashboard, and every head-to-head matchup we track lives in the exchange comparison hub.