HTX Research's Latest Research Report Interpreting Pre-market Trading Ecosystem: How a Hundred Billion Dollar Market Is Reshaping the Web3 Asset Starting Line

By: blockbeats|2025/12/18 17:00:04

Source: HTX Research

Recently, HTX Research, the exclusive research department under Huobi HTX, released a new research report titled "Pre-Trading Asset Trading Ecosystem: Mechanism Evolution Behind a Billion-Dollar Scale, Market Structure, and Future Trends," systematically studying the formation background, asset structure, typical patterns, and profound impact on project issuance and exchange systems of the pre-trading ecosystem in the crypto market.

The report focuses on a trend that is rapidly emerging: in a tightening financing environment and with a lengthening token issuance cycle, pre-TGE trading activity is shifting from scattered attempts to evolve into a "1.5-level market" connecting the primary and secondary markets, gradually becoming an indispensable independent market layer in the crypto industry.

From the "Pre-IPO Vacuum Period" to the Pre-Trading Market: A New Structure Between Primary and Secondary

HTX Research points out that the rise of the pre-trading ecosystem is not accidental. As primary financing contracts and the project issuance cycle passively lengthens, project teams begin to maintain community activity through points, airdrop expectations, testing qualifications, and users continue to invest time and funds before the TGE. In this process, the originally non-negotiable "early contributions" and "future expectations" gradually acquire conditions for securitization.

At the same time, the token issuance threshold has lowered, and the number of projects has surged, making attention a scarce resource. The pre-trading mechanism revolving around attention, expectations, and future equity began to grow naturally, jointly forming an intermediary market that originally only existed within VCs and exchanges. This is an emerging 1.5-level market (Pre-Market), whose role is no longer just a speculative tool but a key structure reshaping the project launch method and early liquidity.

Three Asset Structures Forming the Pre-Trading Ecosystem

Starting from the "Future Value Anchoring Method," HTX Research categorizes pre-trading assets into three structural types:

The first type revolves around the future token value, with its trading patterns mainly including pre-OTC, pre-spot, and pre-perpetual contract trading. These assets are most directly connected to the future spot price and play the most concentrated price discovery function in the pre-trading phase.

The second type revolves around the points system, namely, user behavior points and their financial derivatives, which have gradually formed a standardized points OTC market. Points in airdrop economics carry user contributions and incentive expectations. Through a trading and revenue-splitting mechanism, they are priced into the market in advance.

The third type revolves around future convertible rights, appearing in the form of NFTs, Qualification Certificates, or BuildKey, transforming whitelist access, early access, token allocations, and other non-standard rights into tradable assets.

These three structures together cover the complete chain from "user contribution - market expectation - rights confirmation - final delivery," making pre-market trading no longer a standalone tool but a multi-tier pre-trading system.

Exploring Practices of Huobi HTX Pre-Market Perpetual Contracts

With the expansion of market demand and ecosystem maturity, pre-market trading is evolving from OTC and spot forms to derivative structures. Pre-market perpetual contracts, as an innovative derivative design, allow users to engage in leveraged trading around the future spot price of an asset before its official listing, further advancing price discovery. Currently, pre-market perpetual contracts have become one of the most traded pre-market trading modalities.

In this direction, Huobi HTX was the first to launch WLFI (World Liberty Financial) pre-market perpetual contract trading before the official listing of the highly anticipated project WLFI this year, providing users with tools for early participation in price speculation and risk management before the TGE. This practice also reflects the trend pointed out in the research report: the role of exchanges is shifting from the "listing node" to the "pre-issuance stage," and pre-market trading is becoming an essential part of the exchange's product ecosystem.

Scaling Potential and Structural Challenges of the Pre-Market Market

Pre-market trading has established a clear scale foundation, with leading projects often generating demand in the hundreds of millions of dollars during the pre-market phase. The cumulative pre-market trading volume of projects like WLFI and Monad can even exceed one billion dollars, making pre-market trading a billion-dollar market with further expansion potential.

However, at the same time, the pre-market market also faces clear structural risks: naturally thin liquidity, prices easily manipulated by large funds, high dependency on the project team for delivery, long-term asymmetry of information, and a lack of unified standards in rules, execution, and risk allocation across different asset forms. These issues determine that the further expansion of the pre-market market depends on whether it can transition from an "opportunistic market" to a more institutionalized and co-governed structure.

Conclusion

HTX Research believes that pre-market trading is not a short-term gimmick but a structural trend driven by changes in the funding environment, the evolution of user participation methods, and the extension of trading platform products. It is reshaping the project's issuance path, the exchange's listing logic, and the way users participate in early markets.

During this process, pre-market trading is transitioning from the "pre-issuance gray area" to gradually becoming a key foundational layer connecting the primary and secondary markets. Its ultimate form may become a long-standing presence in the crypto market, continuously institutionalized as a core market structure.

About HTX Research

HTX Research is the dedicated research department under Huobi HTX, responsible for in-depth analysis of a wide range of areas such as cryptocurrency, blockchain technology, and emerging market trends. It produces comprehensive reports, offering professional assessments. HTX Research is committed to providing data-driven insights and strategic foresight, playing a crucial role in shaping industry perspectives and supporting informed decision-making in the digital asset space. With rigorous research methodologies and cutting-edge data analysis, HTX Research consistently stays at the forefront of innovation, leading industry thought and fostering a deep understanding of the evolving market dynamics.

This article is contributed content and does not represent the views of BlockBeats.

On June 9, according to related disclosures, on-chain investigator ZachXBT posted an update on Humanity’s roughly $31 million security incident, saying that after further analyzing fund flows, he currently tends to believe the project team was not involved in an “inside job” or a self-staged attack. According to him, the official explanation about the private key leak was broadly accurate, but before the token unlock, the price of H had been artificially pushed higher, and the hacker later took advantage of that market environment; therefore, the private key leak and the earlier abnormal price pumping should be regarded as two separate and independent events. This reframing has shifted the market’s understanding of the nature of the incident. Earlier discussion around Humanity had focused on whether the team directly participated in the attack or used the security incident to cover up internal operations. ZachXBT’s latest remarks shift the focus from “whether it was self-theft” to “whether there were pre-unlock market structure issues.” He also questioned whether the team may have.

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In the fast-moving digital asset ecosystem, derivatives platforms face an extreme architectural test. High-leverage futures markets demand more than just standard security—they require absolute operational precision, zero-latency matching engines, and ironclad structural scalability, all while navigating intense market volatility.

As global platforms scale to meet these demands, the industry is shifting away from rigid, monolithic setups toward a more agile, "decoupled" infrastructure philosophy.

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The synergy between trusted infrastructure ecosystems and global trading platforms represents the natural evolution of a maturing crypto market. As WEEX continues to scale its global spot and derivatives offerings for over 6 million users, adopting robust backend paradigms proves that platforms no longer have to compromise between cutting-edge trading velocity and uncompromised structural security.

ZachXBT: Humanity private key leak and abnormal surge in H token should be viewed separately