I still remember the phone call. It was late 2022, and a young trader from my 'Rebuild Chicago' support network was sobbing on the line. He had jumped into a low-liquidity perpetual contract on a second-tier exchange, lured by 10x leverage. A single large order from a whale pushed the index price, triggering a cascade of liquidations. His life savings—gone in two minutes. That memory surfaces every time I see a news headline like the one that crossed my desk this week: Huobi HTX is listing perpetual contracts for ISRG, TWLO, LUNR, and EUL, each with up to 10x leverage.
This is not a story about innovation. It is a story about the cold arithmetic of leverage, about how exchanges—even those with a troubled history—continue to push products that exploit the most vulnerable participants. And it is a story that demands we ask: are we building for humans, or just for chains?
Let’s start with the facts. On what appears to be a routine business update, Huobi HTX announced the addition of these four trading pairs to its perpetual contract lineup. The tokens are a motley crew: ISRG and TWLO likely represent synthetic stock tokens (think Insureum and Twilio), while LUNR and EUL are obscure altcoins with thin order books. The maximum leverage is 10x, which in crypto terms is modest, but in the context of these assets is a recipe for disaster.
Why? Because perpetual contracts rely on an oracle-based index price to mark positions. When a token has daily trading volume of a few hundred thousand dollars, a determined player can move that index with a single trade. A 10x lever then amplifies the chaos: a 5% price swing becomes a 50% loss, triggering stop-loss cascades that empty accounts before the trader can blink. This is not theoretical. I have personally audited the after-action reports of such events, and the pattern is always the same—retail bears the loss, while the exchange collects fees and the whale walks away.
Huobi's move is not technically innovative. As I wrote in my 2020 analysis of UnityDAO’s governance, innovation must be measured by its impact on human agency, not just by its novelty. A perpetual contract on an established exchange like Binance or OKX already offers deep liquidity and sophisticated risk controls. Huobi, which has seen its market share shrink to the 5-8% range, is desperate to attract volume. Listing low-cap tokens is a classic play: generate hype, capture a few days of trading frenzy, and extract fees before liquidity evaporates.
But here is where my personal experience forces me to go deeper. In 2017, during the ICO boom, I founded 'Ethical Ledger'—a workshop series that trained over 150 retail investors to read smart contracts and spot fraudulent projects. I saw then that the crypto industry’s greatest sin is not its volatility, but its deliberate opacity. Exchanges know that most users do not understand the mechanics of liquidation price cascades or funding rate asymmetries. They rely on that ignorance.
Code without compassion is cold. This phrase has guided my work for nearly a decade. When I co-designed the quadratic voting system for UnityDAO in 2020, we spent months on community calls—42 of them—not because the code required it, but because trust requires human interaction. We saw a 300% increase in proposal participation because we prioritized human connections over algorithmic efficiency. Huobi’s product offers no such compassion. It is a financial instrument engineered purely for volume, with no thought to the psychological toll it will take on the thousands of retail users who will inevitably over-leverage and lose.
Now, let me play the contrarian—because any honest analyst must. Some will argue that listing these perpetual contracts is a rational business decision. Huobi needs to compete; it cannot offer the same products as Binance and expect to survive. By targeting niche assets, it creates a unique value proposition for traders who want exposure to stock tokens or obscure altcoins in a derivatives format. There is even a possibility that these listings could bring more liquidity to undervalued projects, allowing price discovery that would otherwise take months.
I have considered this argument carefully. I have even seen it play out in my 2025 'Values First' coalition, where we negotiated a $10 million grant from BlackRock’s venture arm conditioned on adopting our transparency protocols. BlackRock’s entry brought capital and legitimacy to smaller DAOs, but only because we insisted on guardrails—human oversight, quarterly audits, and a binding commitment to equitable participation. Huobi has offered no such guardrails. Its product is a naked instrument, sold with no warning labels, no mandatory risk-acknowledgment screens, and no visible effort to cap losses beyond the standard market mechanisms.
Code without compassion is cold. That coldness is the real story here. It is the same coldness that allowed FTX to collapse under the weight of its own leverage in 2022, the same coldness that turned my 'Rebuild Chicago' peers into emotional wreckage. We cannot build a resilient ecosystem if our core products are designed to extract rather than to support.
The contrarian in me acknowledges that regulation could change this. If the SEC or CFTC were to classify stock token perpetuals as securities-based swaps, Huobi would be forced to comply with know-your-customer and investor-suitability rules. That would be a net positive—but it would also drive these products into the shadows, where even less oversight exists. The better path is internal: exchanges must embed human-centric design principles into their product teams. Every perpetual contract should come with a mandatory risk quiz, a max-loss simulation, and a cooling-off period for first-time users. These are not onerous requirements; they are the bare minimum of compassion.
And what about the projects themselves—ISRG, TWLO, LUNR, EUL? Their communities may welcome the trading exposure. But they should be wary. A perpetual contract is a double-edged sword: it can increase liquidity, but it also attracts speculators who have no stake in the project’s long-term health. I have seen DAOs destroyed by mercenary traders who pump and dump the governance token, leaving genuine contributors holding the bag. In a well-governed ecosystem, the community would vote on whether to allow such listings. Huobi’s decision was unilateral, which is exactly the kind of centralization we are supposed to be escaping.
Code without compassion is cold. This is the third time I have invoked this phrase, and I do so deliberately. It is not just a line; it is the thesis of my career. From the 2017 workshops to the 2026 'Human-First Protocols' initiative, I have seen that technology without empathy yields destruction. The Huobi listing is a small data point in a vast industry, but it is a canary in the coal mine. If we allow exchanges to treat our financial lives as mere throughput to be optimized, we will wake up one day in a world where every interaction is transactional and every loss is rationalized as 'user error.'
The takeaway is not to avoid trading these contracts—that is obvious. The takeaway is to demand better. Before you place a trade on any platform, ask yourself: Is this product designed with my humanity in mind? Does it assume I am rational, or does it assume I am fallible? Does it protect me from my worst impulses, or does it exploit them? The answers will guide you not just to better trades, but to a better industry.
We have the tools to build differently. We have the technology to create perpetuals that cap losses, that educate users, that reward long-term holding over short-term gambling. What we lack is the collective will. I have seen that will emerge in small pockets—UnityDAO, the Chicago rebuild, the Values First coalition—but we need it to become the default. Until then, every new listing without compassion is a step closer to the next phone call, the one where a voice on the other end says, "I lost everything."
Don't let that voice be yours.