The LSE Directory / Crypto exchanges
HTX is a cryptocurrency exchange offering spot trading, derivatives (USDT margined and coin margined futures, options), margin trading, P2P trading, copy trading, staking and lending products across several hundred digital assets including Bitcoin and Ethereum. It was founded in Beijing in September 2013 as Huobi by Leon Li, a former Oracle engineer, and rebranded to HTX in September 2023 to mark its tenth anniversary and signal a global relaunch. The exchange is registered in Seychelles and operates today as Huobi Global S.A., after China's 2017 ban on domestic cryptocurrency trading platforms pushed it and most Chinese exchanges offshore. Rather than serving a single niche, HTX competes as a broad multi-product exchange against the largest global platforms on breadth of listed assets and derivatives depth; its own materials describe it as ranking among the top three exchanges worldwide by spot trading volume. By its own reporting it serves more than 59 million registered users and 10 million trading users, has processed more than 38 trillion dollars in cumulative trading volume since launch, and has reached a stated peak platform AUM above 60 billion dollars. It introduced a Proof of Reserves audit in 2022 as a trust signal to retail users given its largely offshore, unlicensed operating structure in most markets, and has pursued individual jurisdictional licensing, including a 2025 Notice of Compliance from Pakistan's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority. Its venture arm, HTX Ventures, has committed a stated 100 million dollar fund to early stage blockchain projects. Huobi raised early angel funding in November 2013 and a 10 million dollar round from Sequoia Capital in 2014, and by the end of that year was China's largest digital asset trading platform by volume. Cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun acquired the exchange in 2022. HTX suffered two related security incidents in 2023: a private key breach in September drained about 7.9 million dollars in ETH from its hot wallet, which the attacker returned weeks later in exchange for a white hat bounty, and a larger breach in November, caused by a separate private key leak on the associated Heco Chain bridge, resulted in losses of roughly 97 million dollars; Sun publicly pledged full compensation for the hot wallet losses and the exchange briefly suspended deposits and withdrawals. In May 2026 the UK government sanctioned HTX, designated as Huobi Global S.A., as part of a package targeting eighteen crypto entities and individuals, accusing it of providing services to A7, a sanctioned Russian payments network, and Garantex, a sanctioned Russian cryptocurrency exchange, in order to help Russia evade international trade restrictions; the UK noted HTX had recorded about 3.3 trillion dollars in trading volume during 2025. It was the first time UK regulators applied Regulation 17A, previously used only against banks, to a cryptoasset exchange, a move that bans correspondent banking relationships and payment processing with the exchange and requires UK virtual asset service providers to trace exposure through multiple transaction hops rather than screening direct counterparties alone.
