Where is HTX restricted?
HTX is restricted in 41 of the 195 countries we cover: all 27 EU member states, 
Canada, 
China, 
Cuba, 
Iran, 
Japan, 
Myanmar, 
North Korea, 
Russia, 
Singapore, 
Sudan, 
Syria, the 
United Kingdom, the 
United States and 
Venezuela.
Thirty-nine come from clause 1.2 of HTX’s user agreement (last updated September 2026), which bars anyone resident in or physically located in a listed jurisdiction from all services. The list also names Hong Kong and six occupied areas of Ukraine, and ends with “all member states of the European Union”. A separate sanctions clause shuts out any country under broad US, UN, EU or UK sanctions.
The other two rest on HTX’s older notices. HTX closed every Canadian account on 31 December 2021, and its OTC restricted list still names Canada and Japan, although neither is in the current agreement. The UK is also an exit: HTX stopped serving it in August 2026 and, in a notice of 16 October, said UK accounts stay restricted and will be closed after a one-time 48-hour withdrawal window.
HTX writes its list strictly but barely enforces it at the door: of the 37 restricted countries we reached, only Singapore was refused. The full list, with the reason for each country, is below.
| Category | Countries | Context | Last verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| Geographic block | HTX's user agreement bars all EU member states, and the EU's Russia sanctions ban transactions with HTX from 23 August 2026 (Regulation 833/2014, Article 5ad). | 20 Oct 2026 | |
| Geographic block | On the all-services restricted list in HTX's user agreement (updated September 2026). | 17 Oct 2026 | |
| Geographic block | HTX closed the accounts of all Canada-based users on 31 December 2021; Canada is still on its OTC restricted list. | 17 Oct 2026 | |
| Geographic block | On HTX's OTC restricted list; not named in the current user agreement. | 17 Oct 2026 | |
| Geographic block | On HTX's restricted list; HTX left the UK in August 2026, and under an FCA settlement (court order of 27 October 2026) it undertakes until 2031 not to promote crypto services to UK consumers unlawfully. | 29 Oct 2026 | |
| Geographic block | On the all-services restricted list in HTX's user agreement (updated September 2026); our geo-access test got HTX's Singapore pop-up. | 17 Oct 2026 |
Belgium
Cyprus
Czechia
France
Hungary
Luxembourg
Malta
Poland
Romania
SlovakiaWhere is HTX limited?
HTX is limited in 26 countries: 
Afghanistan, 
Argentina, 
Bangladesh, 
Bolivia, 
Burundi, 
Ecuador, 
Eritrea, 
Iceland, 
India, 
Iraq, 
Israel, 
Kazakhstan, 
Kyrgyzstan, 
Libya, 
Liechtenstein, 
Malaysia, 
Morocco, 
New Zealand, 
Norway, the 
Philippines, 
Somalia, 
South Sudan, 
Turkey, 
Ukraine, 
Yemen and 
Zimbabwe.
Sixteen are product or payment cuts from HTX’s own documents: the user agreement bars derivatives trading in seven of them, and the OTC list does not accept bank cards issued in nine more, plus Bangladesh and Iraq. Ukraine is limited because only its occupied areas are excluded. Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway are in the EEA but not the EU, so HTX’s EU exclusion does not name them, and HTX has no MiCA authorisation to serve them.
The last six are regulator actions HTX does not enforce. Malaysia’s Securities Commission ordered Huobi Global to stop operating and disable its website and apps in May 2023. Türkiye’s Capital Markets Board put www.htx.com on its list of sites to block in December 2024, Cumhuriyet reported. India’s FIU issued a show cause notice to Huobi in December 2023 and asked the IT ministry to block its URLs, and the Philippine SEC warned in April 2026 that HTX is unregistered, BitPinas reported. In Argentina a San Isidro court ordered the site and app blocked nationwide, iProUP reported in June 2025, and Kazakhstan’s AFSA named HTX in its 29 April 2026 warning on unlicensed platforms. In our test htx.com loaded with no notice from Argentina, Kazakhstan, Malaysia and Türkiye.
Limited means HTX still serves the country, but something is cut back or a regulator stands in the way. The countries and what applies in each are below.
| Category | Countries | Context | Last verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| Partial service | HTX's OTC page does not support bank cards issued here; trading is not restricted. | 17 Oct 2026 | |
| Partial service | HTX's user agreement bars derivatives trading here; spot and other services are not restricted. | 17 Oct 2026 | |
| License requirement | No MiCA authorisation: HTX has no entity on ESMA’s register of authorised CASPs, and ESMA says unauthorised firms must stop serving EEA clients after 1 July 2026. Not in HTX’s EU exclusion, which names EU member states only. | 20 Oct 2026 | |
| Partial service | HTX's user agreement bars derivatives trading here, and its OTC page does not support bank cards issued here. | 17 Oct 2026 | |
| Regulatory warning | AFSA named HTX in its 29 April 2026 warning on unlicensed platforms; the site loaded in our geo-access test. | 19 Oct 2026 | |
| Partial service | Crimea, Sevastopol, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are restricted; the rest of Ukraine is not listed. | 17 Oct 2026 | |
| License requirement | Not on HTX's list, but India's FIU issued a show cause notice to Huobi in December 2023 and asked the IT ministry to block its URLs; HTX is not registered with FIU-IND. | 17 Oct 2026 | |
| Regulatory warning | Not on HTX's list, but the SEC warned in April 2026 that HTX is unregistered and lacks CASP authorisation; no ISP block of HTX has been reported. | 17 Oct 2026 | |
| Regulatory warning | Not on HTX's list, but the Securities Commission ordered Huobi Global to stop operating in Malaysia and disable its website and apps in May 2023; the site loaded from Malaysia in our test. | 17 Oct 2026 | |
| Regulatory warning | Not on HTX's list, but Türkiye's Capital Markets Board ordered access to htx.com blocked in December 2024; the site loaded from a Turkish server in our test. | 17 Oct 2026 | |
| Regulatory warning | Not on HTX's own restricted list, but a San Isidro court ordered the site and app blocked nationwide (reported June 2025, not confirmed lifted) and HTX is not on the CNV register; our test through a VPN still loaded the site. | 17 Oct 2026 |
TaiwanWhere is HTX available?
HTX is available in the other 130 of the 195 countries we cover, among them 
Brazil, 
Switzerland, 
South Korea, 
Thailand and the 
United Arab Emirates.
None of them rests on an HTX licence, because HTX holds none we could confirm. Twenty-five were checked by name, 
Belarus among them: it is under EU crypto sanctions, but HTX’s list and sanctions clause do not name it, Belarus’s December 2025 site blocks did not name HTX, and our test loaded the site. The other 103 are available under our coverage rule: no official document from HTX or a regulator restricts them.
Our geo-access test loaded HTX in 70 of the 128. Available means HTX serves the country, not that local law allows crypto trading. Thailand’s SEC had five exchanges blocked in June 2025 and South Korea’s FIU blocked 27 unregistered ones in October 2026, but neither names HTX, so both stay available until a document does. The table below gives the reason for each country.
| Category | Countries | Context | Last verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| No restriction | Not on the restricted lists in HTX's user agreement (September 2026) and its home and sign-up pages loaded in our geo-access test. | 19 Oct 2026 | |
| No restriction | Not on the restricted lists in HTX's user agreement (September 2026); our geo-access test loaded the site. | 19 Oct 2026 | |
| No restriction | Not on HTX's restricted list (clause 1.2, September 2026), and not blocked in our geo-access test. | 17 Oct 2026 | |
| No restriction | Not on the restricted lists in HTX's user agreement (September 2026), and its home and sign-up pages loaded in our geo-access test. | 20 Oct 2026 | |
| No restriction | Not on the restricted lists in HTX's user agreement, and its pages loaded in our geo-access test. | 19 Oct 2026 | |
| No restriction | Georgia is not on HTX's restricted list (user agreement, September 2026), and its pages loaded in our geo-access test. | 19 Oct 2026 | |
| No restriction | HTX announced a PVARA No Objection Certificate in December 2025; Pakistan is not on the restricted lists in its user agreement (September 2026), and its pages loaded in our test. | 19 Oct 2026 | |
| No restriction | Nigeria is not on the restricted lists in HTX's user agreement (September 2026), and its pages loaded in our geo-access test. | 17 Oct 2026 | |
| No restriction | Not on HTX's restricted list (North Korea only), and not blocked in our geo-access test. | 17 Oct 2026 | |
| No restriction | Not on HTX's restricted list or named in its sanctions clause, not named in Belarus's December 2025 site blocks, and not blocked in our geo-access test. | 20 Oct 2026 | |
| No restriction | Not on HTX's restricted list, and not blocked in our geo-access test. | 17 Oct 2026 | |
| No restriction | Not on HTX's restricted lists; the site loaded in our test. | 20 Oct 2026 | |
| No restriction | Not on the restricted list in HTX's user agreement, and not blocked in our geo-access test. | 07 Nov 2026 | |
| No restriction | Not on the restricted lists in HTX's user agreement (September 2026) and its home and sign-up pages loaded in our geo-access test; no VARA licence on the public register. | 17 Oct 2026 | |
| No restriction | Not on the restricted lists in HTX's user agreement, and its home and sign-up pages loaded in our geo-access test. | 07 Nov 2026 | |
| No restriction | Not on the restricted lists in HTX's user agreement, and not blocked in our geo-access test. | 17 Oct 2026 |
Chile
Colombia
El Salvador
Peru
Bahrain
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Indonesia
Panama
Uruguay
Ghana
Nigeria
Dominican Republic
Costa Rica
South AfricaWhere do HTX’s visitors come from?
Russia sends the most visitors to htx.com, 19.19% in Similarweb’s September 2026 estimate, although HTX’s own list excludes it.
Similarweb counts 12.7 million visits to htx.com over the three months to September 2026, with India at 5.96%, Ukraine at 5.38%, Brazil at 4.53% and Spain at 2.68% behind Russia. The second estimator we use for every exchange, Semrush, publishes no figures for htx.com; its page for the old huobi.com domain shows 171,000 visits in September, so we chart Similarweb alone.
Two restricted countries sit in the top five, and our test shows why that is possible: from Russia and from Spain, htx.com and its sign-up page loaded with no block or notice. Estimators model traffic from panels and samples, so treat any single share as an estimate.
HTX geo-access test: what we saw from 129 countries
HTX’s home page refused visitors by IP address in 1 of the 129 countries we reached, Singapore, and showed a notice in two more, the UK and the US.
We ran the test ourselves on 16 October 2026, with the same method as for every platform. A browser with a VPN connected to one country at a time and loaded HTX’s home page and its sign-up page, each time in a fresh private window with no cookies. Cookie banners were hidden but never accepted, and bot checks were waited out, never solved. Every run saved the page text and a screenshot.
Of the 133 places tested (129 of our 195 countries plus Hong Kong, Macau, Puerto Rico and Taiwan), 59 of the countries went through VPN servers located there and 70 through virtual locations hosted elsewhere, which HTX treats as the intended country. A virtual location tests HTX’s own blocking only; it cannot see a block run by a country’s internet providers.
BlockedSingapore · Home page
The one IP block: a Singapore pop-up citing the Payment Services Act
“It appears that you may be accessing HTX from Singapore.”
Notice shownUnited Kingdom · Home page
A notice, not a block, in the UK, where sign-up still loads
“The products and services on this website are not intended for users in the United Kingdom.”
Notice shownUnited States · Home page
The same notice from a US address
“The products and services on this website are not intended for users in the United States of America.”
Notice shown
Hong Kong · Home page
Hong Kong gets the notice too
“The products and services on this website are not intended for users in Hong Kong, China.”
No barrier
Germany · Sign-up page
Restricted in the EU, yet sign-up loads from Germany with no notice
No barrier
Italy · Home page
Italy, under the same EU ban, loads with no notice
No barrierChina · Home page
Mainland China, where HTX retired its accounts in 2021, loads with no barrier
No barrierJapan · Sign-up page
No notice from Japan
No barrierCanada · Home page
Canada, closed to HTX users since 2021, loads with no notice
No barrierRussia · Sign-up page
Russia, on HTX's own list, through a virtual location: no barrier
No barrier
Netherlands · Sign-up page
The Netherlands: the EU is barred in HTX's terms, yet sign-up loads with no notice
No barrier
Spain · Sign-up page
HTX's terms bar the EU, yet the Spanish sign-up form loads
“Welcome to HTX”
No barrier
Australia · Home page
Australia: the home page loaded with no barrier
No barrierTurkey · Home page
Turkey, where the Capital Markets Board ordered htx.com blocked in 2024: a Turkish VPN exit loads the page, since a national block need not show through a VPN
No barrierPhilippines · Home page
Loaded with no barrier from a Philippine address
No barrier
Vietnam · Home page
No barrier: the home page loads normally
No barrier
Mexico · Sign-up page
Mexico: the registration form loads with no barrier
“Welcome to HTX”
No barrierArgentina · Home page
Argentina: the home page loads through our VPN, although a court has ordered it blocked at the internet provider level
No barrier
Portugal · Sign-up page
HTX's terms bar the EU, yet the Portuguese sign-up form loads
“Welcome to HTX”
No barrier
Ireland · Home page
Ireland: the home page loads, although its user agreement bars EU residents
No barrier
Austria · Sign-up page
Austria is barred by the terms, yet the sign-up form loads
“Welcome to HTX”
No barrierNew Zealand · Home page
New Zealand: the page loads with no notice
No barrier
Kenya · Sign-up page
Kenya: the HTX sign-up form loads with no notice
No barrier
Sweden · Home page
Sweden: HTX's home page loads although its terms bar every EU state
No barrierNorway · Home page
Norway: the home page loads with no notice
No barrier
Finland · Home page
Finland: the home page loads with no notice
No barrier
Denmark · Home page
Denmark: HTX's home page loads although its terms bar every EU state
No barrier
Greece · Home page
Greece: the home page loads with no notice
No barrier
Bulgaria · Home page
Bulgaria: the home page loads with no notice
No barrier
Croatia · Home page
Croatia: the home page loads with no notice
No barrier
Latvia · Home page
Latvia: the home page loads with no notice
No barrier
Estonia · Home page
Estonia: the home page loads with no notice
No barrier
Egypt · Sign-up page
Egypt: sign-up loads with no notice
No barrier
Lithuania · Home page
Lithuania: the home page loads with no notice
No barrierMorocco · Sign-up page
Morocco: the HTX sign-up page loads with no barrier
No barrier
Slovenia · Home page
Slovenia: the home page loads with no notice
No barrierIceland · Home page
Iceland: the home page loads with no notice
No barrier
Pakistan · Home page
Pakistan: the home page loads with no notice
No barrier
Georgia · Home page
Georgia: the home page loads with no notice
No barrier
Serbia · Sign-up page
Serbia: sign-up loads with no barrier
No barrierBangladesh · Home page
Bangladesh: the home page loads with no notice; HTX bars derivatives and bank cards here in its documents
CRYPTORESTRICTIONSThe test does not decide a country’s status on its own: official documents come first, and a page that loads is not permission to use HTX.
Three patterns stand out. First, Singapore is the only hard stop: a pop-up names the Payment Services Act and the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the one restricted country where HTX cites a regulator. That is the opposite of OKX, whose home page refused visitors in every listed country it reached in the same week. Second, the UK, the US and Hong Kong get a dismissable notice that the site is not intended for their users, while sign-up stays open. Third, the 27 EU states, Russia, China, Canada and Japan loaded with no barrier at all, so HTX’s restrictions there are enforced, if at all, at registration or verification.
Iran, North Korea, Malta and Myanmar were not tested: our VPN offers no location in the first two, and our only runs from Malta and Myanmar predate HTX’s addition to the test. The full result for every place is below.
All 133 test results, country by country
HTX licences and registrations
HTX holds no licence or registration we could confirm on any regulator’s register; what it has is a No Objection Certificate in Pakistan and a record of sanctions, enforcement and warnings.
In December 2025 Pakistan’s Virtual Asset Regulation Authority gave HTX a No Objection Certificate “to initiate the licensing process”, which is not a licence. ESMA’s register of authorised MiCA firms has no HTX entity, and the one HTX-named entry on ESMA’s non-compliant list, filed by Italy’s CONSOB, is htxcoin-az.com, a lookalike site rather than HTX. The user agreement does not name the company behind the platform; the UK and EU sanctions lists name Huobi Global S.A.
Sanctions
- United Kingdom: Huobi Global S.A. was designated under the UK’s Russia sanctions on 26 May 2026, with an asset freeze, according to the UK Sanctions List, which gives htx.com as its website.
- European Union: “HTX (HUOBI GLOBAL SA)” is listed in Annex XLV of the Russia-sanctions regulation from 23 August 2026 (covered below).
Enforcement and warnings
- United Kingdom: the FCA, which has HTX on its Warning List, took legal action over illegal financial promotions to UK consumers, announced in February 2026. The case settled in October 2026: under a court order of 27 October, HTX undertakes until 2031 not to promote crypto services to UK consumers unlawfully.
- Malaysia: a public reprimand of Huobi Global and its chief executive, Leon Li, with an order to cease operating, in May 2023.
- Austria: the FMA warned investors on 13 June 2024 that HTX is not authorised to provide banking services there.
- India, Philippines, Türkiye: the FIU notice, the SEC advisory and the SPK block described above.
HTX and MiCA in the EU
HTX has no MiCA authorisation, and since 23 August 2026 EU sanctions bar EU persons from transacting with it at all, so the whole EU is restricted.
MiCA is the EU’s crypto rulebook, and since 30 December 2024 it has required exchanges serving EU clients to hold an authorisation from one member state (our MiCA article covers the rules). HTX holds none, and ESMA’s register shows no HTX entity. In July 2026 the EU’s Russia-sanctions package, Regulation 2026/1848, added HTX to Annex XLV of Regulation 833/2014, the list of crypto-asset and payment providers outside the Union that significantly frustrate the sanctions. Article 5ad of that regulation bans any direct or indirect transaction with a listed provider, and the ban on HTX applies from 23 August 2026.
HTX is the only platform in our MiCA dataset under EU sanctions. Unlike Gate, which serves the EEA through Gate EU under a MiCA licence from Malta’s MFSA, HTX has no EU entity at all. The regulation leaves EU users one way out: national authorities may authorise transactions strictly needed to withdraw funds or close an account, for EU, EEA or Swiss nationals and residents who ask within three months of the listing applying, with the money going to an EU bank or financial institution.
The EEA states outside the EU sit in between. Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway are not named in HTX’s EU exclusion, and we found no national act adopting the HTX listing, so we record them as limited for want of a MiCA authorisation, not as sanctioned.
HTX and the EU timeline
Is HTX available in the US?
No. The United States is on the all-services list in HTX’s user agreement, HTX has no US entity, and the ban covers every state.
When we loaded htx.com from a US address on 16 October 2026, the home page showed a notice that its products and services “are not intended for users in the United States of America”, but the sign-up page loaded. That makes the US one of three places, with the UK and Hong Kong, where HTX warns rather than blocks.
HTX availability by US state
HTX’s US exclusion has no carve-outs: the clause names the United States of America, with no state or service left out, and HTX runs no separate US exchange of the kind some rivals use to serve Americans.
HTX regulator actions and market moves: timeline
HTX’s exits came in two waves. In 2021 it stopped mainland China sign-ups on 24 September and retired those accounts by the end of the year, and closed Canada the same December. In 2026 the UK and the EU followed under sanctions, the same year Bybit closed to new UK registrations.
HTX KYC and identity verification
HTX verifies accounts in three levels, and an account cannot deposit or withdraw until it has passed the first; HTX publishes no amounts for any level.
HTX’s verification guide says Level 1 asks for nationality, ID number, name and date of birth and “unlocks deposit and withdrawal permissions”. Level 2 asks for photos of a passport, ID card or driving licence, and Level 3 for face recognition; both raise deposit, withdrawal and crypto purchase limits. Users in a region the flow does not support may be offered Dominican citizenship verification instead.
Location checks come on top of the documents. Under the user agreement, “from” a jurisdiction means resident in or physically located in it, and since August 2026 UK IP addresses cannot complete registration or verification, according to HTX’s UK notice.
HTX verification history
In August 2021 HTX cut the daily withdrawal limit for accounts without ID verification to 0.06 BTC, from 8 August. Its current guide, first published in November 2022, removes even that: Level 1 is what opens deposits and withdrawals.
Third-party tier tables with BTC limits per level still circulate, but HTX’s own pages give no figures, so we do not repeat them. For how HTX’s checks compare with other exchanges, see our guide to crypto exchange KYC.
What if HTX is restricted where you live?
It depends on the country: of the 21 other platforms we track, the median EU state has 11 available and Singapore 7, but Cuba, Iran and North Korea have one each.
A VPN is no route around it. HTX’s agreement applies its list to anyone resident in or physically located in a listed country, lets HTX freeze withdrawals from such accounts, and in the UK HTX checks IP addresses at registration. What is left is a platform that is allowed to serve you where you live.
The chart shows how much choice each restricted country has. EU residents keep the most, with four centralised exchanges open at the median state; Singapore keeps five, the UK and Japan two each. In Cuba, Iran and North Korea almost every platform we track is restricted, and in China, Sudan and Syria more than half are restricted.
Each country page lists every platform we track there with its status and sources; start from our country index.
