HFT Overview

The CoinSwitch HFT (High-Frequency Trading) APIs are built for traders who need to send a lot of orders quickly — much faster than the regular Futures API allows. If you're writing a market-maker, an arbitrage bot, or anything that places dozens of orders per second on a single symbol, this is the surface for you.

HFT looks different from Spot and Futures v2 in three places: it uses a different base URL, wraps responses in a different envelope, and streams real-time data over NATS instead of Socket.IO. Everything else (signature scheme, headers) is the same.

Should you use HFT?

You're doing this	Use
A bot that places a few orders per minute	Regular Futures — simpler, same data
A strategy that quotes on both sides continuously	HFT
Cross-venue arb that needs sub-second reaction times	HFT
Anything sending >100 requests/minute on a single symbol	HFT

The regular Futures API allows 20–100 requests / 60 seconds per endpoint. If you're well under that ceiling, HFT just adds operational complexity (different envelope, different sockets) for no real benefit.

Getting started

HFT futures is available to all CoinSwitch PRO users with API keys — no application or whitelist email is needed.

1. Transfer USDT or INR from your CoinSwitch wallet to your HFT trading account using Transfer Funds. Your HFT account is provisioned automatically on the first successful transfer, and the settlement currency you transfer first locks the account — all subsequent transfers must use the same currency.
2. By default, the account trades futures (category: linear). Place your first order via Place Order.
3. To trade options, see Options Access (Private Beta) — options is still allowlisted per API key.

For questions or higher rate-limit allocations, contact api@coinswitch.co.

Endpoints surface

HFT lives at a different base URL from v2 Spot/Futures: https://dma.coinswitch.co/

REST paths are /v5/market/..., /v5/order/..., /v5/position/..., /v5/execution/..., plus /dma/api/v1/funds/transfer for moving funds in and out.

WebSocket access is via NATS — see Sockets.

Authentication

HFT uses the same Ed25519 signature scheme as Spot and Futures: X-AUTH-APIKEY, X-AUTH-SIGNATURE, X-AUTH-EPOCH headers, signature over METHOD + path_with_query + epoch.

The only difference is X-AUTH-EPOCH is mandatory on HFT — requests without it are rejected with 400. The Reference Client always sends it, so as long as you point its BASE_URL at https://dma.coinswitch.co, you're fine.

Response envelope

Unlike Spot/Futures ({"data": ...}), HFT responses use the envelope:

{
  "retCode": 0,
  "retMsg": "OK",
  "result": { ... },
  "retExtInfo": {},
  "time": 1756460688504
}

See Response Envelope for details.

Rate limits

Treat HFT rate limits conservatively — back off aggressively on 429 responses, monitor your error rate, and if you need a higher allocation, contact api@coinswitch.co.

What's not in HFT

• No Spot trading via HFT. Use Spot Reference for INR/USDT spot.