Hotstuff Stats 2026: Volume, OI & Fees

Hotstuff Review 2026

What Hotstuff is

Hotstuff is a perpetuals exchange that runs on its own layer-1 blockchain, also called Hotstuff, built around DracoBFT — a consensus design derived from the HotStuff BFT family that gave the project its name. The team claims 75ms block times and 200,000 TPS; both numbers are the project's own and have not been independently benchmarked, so we label them as claims. The venue opened as a private beta in early February 2026 and reported $25M in volume across its first 72 hours. A points program followed on February 26.

The pitch is a familiar one — Hyperliquid-style vertical integration, own chain, gasless CLOB — with two twists: a market list that reaches well beyond crypto, and a "confidential CLOB" that keeps order flow private at the matching layer rather than broadcasting every action publicly.

Read this before depositing: the audit gap

This is the section that matters most, so it comes before the fees. As of July 2026, Hotstuff has published no security audit for the core exchange, its matching engine, or the Hotstuff L1 itself. The only public security review anywhere in the stack is a Sherlock audit contest covering the Ethereum bridge, held in January 2026. The chain your collateral lives on, the consensus it depends on, and the exchange logic that holds your positions are all unreviewed by any named third party.

An unaudited exchange on an unaudited chain is a compounding risk, not an additive one: a failure in either layer can take deposits with it, and there is no external report to tell you which failure modes were even considered. Plenty of young venues on our rankings launched pre-audit, but most confine the blast radius to contracts on an established chain. Hotstuff does not. Our security score of 4/10 reflects that. If you trade here, size every deposit as money you can afford to lose entirely, and revisit once real audits land.

Fees: genuinely aggressive, rebate included

The standard tier pays makers a rebate of −0.002% and charges takers 0.025%. That taker rate matches Extended and undercuts Hyperliquid's 0.045%, while the negative maker fee means resting orders earn rather than pay — a model usually reserved for VIP ladders elsewhere. Hotstuff's own VIP tiers push further: rebates deepen to 0.014% and taker pricing drops to 0.020% at the top. Everything is gasless, so there is no per-action chain cost stacked on top. Fee-wise, this is one of the sharpest schedules we track in the fee calculator — which is exactly why the audit gap stings. Cheap execution is worthless if the venue holding your margin fails.

Markets: crypto plus Mag7, FX, and energy

The board lists 22+ markets. Crypto majors run to 50x on BTC and ETH, 25x on SOL, HYPE, and BNB, and 20x on XRP. Around them sit Mag7 equity perps, FX pairs, index products, and energy contracts on WTI, Brent, and natural gas. Collateral is USDC across the board. That breadth on one gasless book is something only a handful of venues attempt, and it is the strongest genuine reason to watch this venue mature.

Referral and points economics

Hotstuff currently offers the best classic referral terms of the new-wave perp DEXes: referees get a flat 5% fee discount with no volume strings, and referrers earn 10-25% of fees. The points program distributes 1.5M points weekly but is scheduled to end by Q3 2026, and no token exists yet, so points are a bet on an unannounced conversion. Volume runs about $13.3M per day against $8.5M of open interest, with $1.6B cumulative — early numbers that trail every established venue in our directory.

Backing and verdict

The website lists Delphi Ventures, Dialectic, Stake Capital, 1inch, and Gnosis as backers; round sizes are not disclosed, so we report the names as listed rather than verified amounts. The design is ambitious and the fee schedule is real. But until the exchange and its L1 publish serious third-party audits, Hotstuff belongs in the experiment bucket: trade small, farm the referral discount if you like, and keep the bulk of your stack on venues that have been reviewed.

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