# TxFlow review: seven months on a brand-new perp DEX

A perpetuals DEX on its own L1, live since March 2026. Non-custodial, gated, and copying Hyperliquid's fee card exactly. What it has not proved yet.

- URL: https://pushpendra.info/articles/txflow-review
- Author: Pushpendra Singh
- Language: English
- Topics: txflow, dex, perpetuals, review, no-kyc

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I have had an account on TxFlow for a while now, traded on it, and withdrawn from it. This is
what I actually think, including the parts that will cost me referral income.

## What it is

TxFlow is an exchange that runs on its own Layer 1 chain. It launched on **28 March 2026**, so
in November 2026 it is roughly seven months old. The founders are listed as Matt Hu, Harrison
Rea and Jack Wang, and the project describes itself as community-owned rather than
company-controlled.

The product is perpetual futures first: around **150 perpetual pairs** against roughly 20 spot
pairs. Collateral is USDC. It is **non-custodial**, so there is no exchange balance, and
**no KYC**, though there is an access gate I will come back to.

## The one design decision that matters

Most DEXs you have used are automated market makers. You trade against a pool and the price
slides along a curve.

TxFlow runs a **central limit order book, fully on-chain**. Same structure as Binance or Bybit:
real limit orders, real market orders, a visible book with depth on both sides. For perpetuals
this is not a preference, it is close to a requirement. An AMM cannot give you a tight fill on a
leveraged position, which is why on-chain perps took so long to become usable.

If you have avoided decentralised exchanges because they felt nothing like the trading screens
you know, this will feel familiar in a way those did not. That is the genuine achievement here,
and I do not want the criticism below to drown it.

## Fees, and the claim you should stop repeating

Base tier is **0.015% maker and 0.045% taker** on perpetuals, **0.040% and 0.070%** on spot.
Tiers run VIP 0 to VIP 6 on 14-day volume, with maker fees reaching 0% above $500 million and
top-tier taker at 0.024%. Deposits are free. Withdrawals cost 0.1 to 0.5 USDC by network.

Those are good rates, genuinely below most centralised venues.

They are also **identical to Hyperliquid's, digit for digit**. TxFlow has adopted that fee card
wholesale. So "lower fees than Hyperliquid" appears on a great many TxFlow pages and is simply
untrue, and Hyperliquid can be the cheaper venue because staking HYPE cuts its fees a further
5% to 40% with no TxFlow equivalent. Full side-by-side in
[TxFlow vs Hyperliquid](/articles/txflow-vs-hyperliquid).

## What I like

**Tokenised stocks and commodities on the same collateral.** US equity, metals and oil futures
beside crypto perps, from one USDC balance, no brokerage account, no separate onboarding. That
is a real differentiator rather than a repackaged one. Whether demand for it lasts is open, but
nothing else on my partner list does it.

**Non-custodial, and it means something.** After the year Indian users have had with exchange
incidents, including CoinDCX confirming a $16 million loss in October 2026 after first denying
it, an architecture where the venue never holds your coins is not a talking point. It removes
an entire category of risk.

**The fill quality on major pairs is better than I expected** for something this young. On BTC
and ETH perps at ordinary retail size I have not had a fill that made me wince.

## What I do not like

**Seven months is a sample, not a track record.** It has not traded through a violent move yet.
Every venue looks solid until the day it does not, and the information you most want about an
exchange is its behaviour on the worst day of the year. That data does not exist here.

**Audit coverage is the bridge only.** OpenZeppelin audited the **bridge contract**. Auditing
the bridge first is the right instinct, because bridges are where the largest losses in this
industry have happened. But it is one contract, and "audited" in marketing rarely distinguishes
between some and all.

**The 250,000 transactions per second figure is self-published.** It appears in nearly every
article about TxFlow and is always sourced to TxFlow. It may be accurate. It is not evidence,
and the uniformity with which it is repeated tells you how much independent checking has gone
into the coverage.

**Liquidity is thinner than the majors**, and on a perp venue that is the weakness you cannot
argue around. A 0.045% taker fee on a $10,000 position is $4.50. Filling half a percent worse
than the screen costs $50. **Slippage dwarfs fees**, it scales with your size, and it never
appears in a fee comparison.

**The access gate flatters the numbers.** TxFlow needs an access code from its Discord. Gating
filters for intent and makes early metrics look tidier per user than open access would. You
find out what the real demand was on the day the gate comes off. Practical guide to getting
through it in [how to get a TxFlow access code](/articles/txflow-access-code).

## The warning I would put above all of this

TxFlow's own documentation **advises against account-abstraction wallets** (smart contract
wallets rather than standard key pairs) and states the worst-case outcome is **funds stuck in
the contract**.

I read a dozen TxFlow reviews while researching this. One mentioned it.

If your wallet recovers from a 12 or 24 word seed phrase, you are fine. If you sign in with
email or a social account, or recovery runs through guardians, check before depositing. A
hardware wallet is in the safe category here, not the risky one. Ninety-second check in
[the wallet that gets your funds stuck](/articles/txflow-wallet-funds-stuck).

## On the airdrop

Most people asking me about TxFlow are asking whether farming it now pays later.

**There is no confirmed airdrop.** A points system and a fee rebate, and nothing promised.
Several review sites imply a retroactive distribution, and that implication does a lot of work
in their referral funnels.

Farming an unconfirmed airdrop means paying certain fees today, on volume you would not
otherwise trade, for a distribution nobody has promised at a size nobody has stated on a date
nobody has set. Sometimes it pays spectacularly. The failures are invisible because nobody
screenshots the protocol they farmed that never distributed.

## Who it is for

**Use it if** you want tokenised equity or commodity exposure alongside crypto perps, you
already understand leverage, you trade at a size where thin books do not hurt you, and you can
treat the position as speculative.

**Do not use it if** you are new to perpetuals, you need depth for large orders, you hold a
smart contract wallet, or the airdrop is your only reason.

**How much?** Less than feels reasonable. Non-custodial removes the risk of the venue losing
your balance. It does not remove smart contract risk, bridge risk or chain risk. It moves the
failure mode, it does not delete it.

My own position is small enough that if the chain stopped tomorrow it would annoy me rather
than hurt me. That is not a prediction about TxFlow, it is the only honest answer to a question
nobody can answer at seven months, and I wrote about why I stopped making the other kind of call
in [why I stopped giving price predictions](/articles/why-i-stopped-giving-price-predictions).

Longer assessment of the hype question, with the four numbers that will settle it, in
[will TxFlow be the next hype](/articles/will-txflow-be-the-next-hype).

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Written by Pushpendra Singh, crypto educator and founder of SmartViewAI, Top Crypto Educator at
Consensus 2025. Not financial or tax advice. https://pushpendra.info
