PANAMA CITY, Dec. 30, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — In 2025, amid white-hot competition in futures trading, HTX Futures achieved a milestone expansion of its user base, driven by robust risk controls and ongoing product innovation. As we pivot toward 2026, the industry is asking: How will HTX Futures sustain this momentum? And what is the driving force behind the “Copy Trading 4.0” buzz?
In the latest episode of Real Talk with HTX Executives, YOYO, Head of HTX Futures, addressed users directly to unpack the brand’s 2025 milestones and unveil the strategic blueprint for 2026.
Copy Trading 4.0: A System-Level Product Rebuild
Launched in 2023 and iterated throughout 2024, Copy Trading 4.0 saw breakout growth in late 2025. It is now recognized as the benchmark for HTX’s “human-centric” transformation. YOYO summarized this leap forward with three pillars: Enhanced User-Friendliness, Absolute Transparency, and Superior Security.
The copy trading engine is now natively integrated into the core futures interface. This “develop once, deploy everywhere” architecture ensures that every new futures feature is instantly available to copy traders, drastically shortening the innovation cycle.
For beginners, Smart Copy Mode removes the friction of complex configurations, allowing users to follow elite traders with balanced risk exposure. The system also offers a seamless “dual-identity” switch, letting users toggle between being a follower and a lead trader.
To prevent position commingling, the system now utilizes independent capital pools for each followed trader. Furthermore, the migration from order-based to position-based logic provides a more intuitive, real-time overview of portfolio health.
YOYO emphasized that 4.0 is not the finish line. The next phase involves integrating AI-driven strategies and expanding the elite trader ecosystem to ensure a sustainable, high-yield future for all participants.
Annual Review: What Did HTX Futures Get Right in 2025?
Looking back on the year soon coming to a close, YOYO described the trajectory of HTX Futures as one of “accumulative growth”. She revealed that the HTX Futures user base expanded by 2 to 3 times in 2025.
According to YOYO, this growth was not fueled by short-term market tailwinds but was a natural outcome of users’ long-term trust in the platform. This trust is underpinned by two core strengths HTX has consistently reinforced over the year – its brand foundation and service capabilities. These strengths are increasingly being converted into sustainable, long-term competitive advantages for its futures business.
- Security and Risk Control: The Bedrock of Long-Term Trust
First and foremost is HTX’s risk control and security system. For futures traders, security remains the single most critical factor in decision-making.
YOYO noted that over the past 12 years, HTX has continuously strengthened and refined its risk-control system, building a comprehensive defense that spans user fund isolation, system stability, and resilience under extreme market conditions. Whether during the recent industry turbulence around October 11 or amid multiple periods of intense volatility earlier this year, HTX Futures experienced no major systemic risk incidents. Its proven resilience in maintaining stable operations through repeated real-world stress tests has become a fundamental pillar supporting long-term user trust.
- Liquidity Development: A Key Milestone for the Futures Business
On liquidity, YOYO revealed that since April this year, HTX has achieved significant improvements in liquidity depth across major cryptocurrencies as well as selected secondary assets, with overall levels nearly doubling. This progress stands out as one of the most important developments for HTX Futures in 2025.
She also admitted that there is still room for improvement in certain long-tail and trending assets. Moving forward, the team will continue to solidify the foundations of K2 and secondary assets while rolling out more diversified solutions to optimize liquidity across all assets. This capability, in turn, is set to become one of the most critical and enduring competitive moats of HTX’s futures business.
- Trading Speed and System Capabilities: Built for High-Frequency and Quantitative Traders
For high-frequency and quantitative traders, execution speed and system performance are paramount. YOYO explained that in May 2025, HTX launched its Multi-Assets Collateral system, which not only supports cross-asset hedging strategies involving cryptocurrencies such as BTC and ETH but has also boosted API trading throughput by nearly fourfold.
Today, a substantial portion of high-frequency quantitative trading activity on the platform has already migrated to this system. Meanwhile, the underlying matching infrastructure continues to undergo optimization. A brand-new matching engine is expected to go live in the first quarter of 2026, further enhancing the smoothness and stability of futures trading.
- A Financial Product Suite: Enhancing Capital Efficiency and User Retention
While continuously strengthening its fundamental trading capabilities, HTX has steadily built out a more comprehensive financial product suite, now a key pillar for long-term user retention.
Since the launch of SmartEarn in December 2024, HTX Futures has centered its efforts on enhancing capital utilization efficiency. Designed around low entry thresholds and flexible deposits and withdrawals, SmartEarn allows users to earn annualized yields simply by keeping funds in their USDT-M accounts. YOYO revealed that SmartEarn is set to undergo another major iteration in 2026. Without raising usage barriers, its annualized yield potential is expected to increase by 2–3 times.
At the same time, HTX continues to upgrade both its grid trading and copy trading systems. The grid trading system was fully revamped in 2025, followed by the launch of Copy Trading 4.0 toward the end of the year.
In 2026, the team will further ramp up investment in AI-powered strategy trading tools, including AI trading assistants and integrated strategy capabilities. It is dedicated to making proven, mature strategies accessible to users at a lower entry threshold, helping them pursue long-term, sustainable returns.
YOYO emphasized that throughout its business growth, the HTX Futures team has remained committed to engaging directly with users, actively listening to authentic feedback across multiple channels, and using those insights as the primary engine for product optimization and iteration. This virtuous cycle has not only fostered increasingly deep user trust but has also become a solid foundation for business growth. At the same time, the team has consistently served every user with sincerity and dedication. Backed by strong group-level resource support for the futures business, it has become increasingly clear that the turnaround from user feedback to product iteration is getting faster.
The Next Phase of Capacity Building for Futures Trading
Looking ahead to 2026, the strategic direction of HTX Futures remains clear and focused – continuous product refinement, optimization of liquidity structures, improvements in capital efficiency, and deeper strengthening of risk-control frameworks to further solidify the foundational capabilities of the futures business. On this basis, an especially significant shift is now taking shape: exploring ways to return greater proactive risk-management control to users.
In YOYO’s view, the platform’s responsibility extends beyond providing users with robust systems and baseline safety protections. Through product and mechanism design, it should also equip users with mature, clear, and actionable risk-management tools, enabling them to actively participate in managing their own trading risks with a full understanding of potential risks. This also means that, on top of existing system security and risk-control frameworks, HTX Futures will help users establish more transparent and controllable risk-management pathways, so that risk control is no longer a passive outcome, but an integral part of trading decision-making.
Apparently, HTX Futures’ strategy goes beyond scale expansion, pointing instead toward a more mature trading infrastructure and a more clearly defined risk-management paradigm.
From system-level product reconstruction to an evolution in risk-control philosophy, HTX Futures is seeking to answer a longer-term question: in a highly volatile crypto market, how can more users participate in futures trading in a more controlled, rational manner, and ultimately realize long-term value? This, perhaps, is where its true competitive edge in the next phase will lie.
About HTX
Founded in 2013, HTX (formerly Huobi) has evolved from a virtual asset exchange into a comprehensive ecosystem of blockchain businesses that span digital asset trading, financial derivatives, research, investments, incubation, and other businesses.
As a world-leading gateway to Web3, HTX harbors global capabilities that enable it to provide users with safe and reliable services. Adhering to the growth strategy of “Global Expansion, Thriving Ecosystem, Wealth Effect, Security & Compliance,” HTX is dedicated to providing quality services and values to virtual asset enthusiasts worldwide.
To learn more about HTX, please visit https://www.htx.com/ or HTX Square , and follow HTX on X, Telegram, and Discord.
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