A full perpetual futures exchange has reportedly been operating on the IOTA testnet since September 16, putting the network’s transaction capacity and settlement model under an unusually demanding workload. The project has not been publicly announced as a production exchange, but the reported implementation includes trading, margin, liquidation and risk-management infrastructure.
According to the report, the platform offers 24 perpetual markets covering Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, BNB, Dogecoin, Zcash and Hyperliquid’s HYPE token. Traders can reportedly use leverage of up to 40x, with both liquidation and auto-deleveraging mechanisms built into the system.
The reported exchange also includes an insurance fund, cross and isolated margin, withdrawal cooldowns and a fee structure of zero maker fees and a 0.038% taker fee. Those features indicate that the test is intended to exercise more than basic transaction processing and instead simulate the operational requirements of a leveraged derivatives venue.
IOTA Testnet Faces a Real Trading Workload
The report claims the exchange has processed as many as 129 trades per second and more than 12.1 million trades since September 16. Those figures have not been independently verified from IOTA’s official channels, but if accurate, they would represent a significantly different workload from ordinary token transfers or simple application transactions.
Price data reportedly comes from Pyth Pro, Pyth Network’s institutional market-data infrastructure. IOTA officially announced its connection to Pyth Pro in July, describing lower latency, higher reliability and access to more than 3,000 feeds. IOTA specifically identified perpetual exchanges among the applications that could benefit from the upgraded infrastructure.
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Pyth’s own documentation describes Pyth Pro as a commercial, subscription-based market-data service covering multiple asset classes. The transition also replaced the previous Pyth Core infrastructure on IOTA, with Pyth stating that Pyth Core support for IOTA ended on August 26.
The report says all eight underlying assets were compared with their external market prices, with the widest observed difference reaching 0.36%. That comparison is particularly relevant for perpetual contracts because inaccurate reference prices can affect liquidations, margin requirements and the resulting solvency of a derivatives platform.
The more significant question concerns what happens if the exchange moves from testnet to mainnet. The report measured approximately 0.23 user transactions per second on IOTA mainnet during a six-minute period on September 21, compared with roughly 28 transactions per second from the test exchange.
Mainnet Security Remains the Bigger Question
Based on those measurements, the report estimates that moving the exchange to mainnet could increase the network’s user workload by roughly 120 times while more than doubling total throughput. These are projections based on the reported testnet activity rather than a demonstrated mainnet result.
The testnet itself has reportedly operated continuously since November 2024, with 12 of its 20 validators also participating in the mainnet environment. That provides some continuity between the two networks, although validator composition alone does not establish equivalent economic security.
The central distinction is economic risk. The report notes that the mainnet committee has billions of IOTA at stake, while the testnet operates with no comparable financial value at risk. For a leveraged exchange, this difference matters because finality is directly connected to collateral, liquidation and settlement.
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The report also identifies unusual transaction concentration. It claims 3,690 packages were published on the testnet over seven days, with 98.6% attributed to five addresses associated with the same development team. One address reportedly publishes the complete application stack repeatedly throughout the day, while activity falls sharply during weekends.
That pattern could indicate a controlled load test rather than organic user demand. A test environment dominated by the application’s own transactions can demonstrate technical throughput, but it does not establish that independent traders would generate comparable activity after launch.
The exchange therefore remains an experiment rather than proof of a new IOTA derivatives market. There is no public evidence in the material reviewed here confirming an open-source release, public frontend, production launch or migration to IOTA mainnet. The reported activity nevertheless provides an interesting stress test for the network, particularly because derivatives platforms place demands on pricing, finality, collateral and transaction throughput simultaneously.
For IOTA, the significance will ultimately depend on whether infrastructure tested privately can become a functioning public application. The reported perpetual exchange shows what can be built on the testnet, while its potential mainnet impact raises a separate question about economic security and sustainable user activity. Until the platform is publicly launched and its figures can be independently verified, the results should be viewed as a testnet demonstration rather than confirmed mainnet adoption.
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