What is Hibachi?

Hibachi is a privacy-first exchange built for traders. It enables fast, precise execution while keeping positions private by default, through a simple and intuitive trading experience

As a new exchange entering a crowded market, the team needed to generate early trading activity without relying on short-term tactics that inflate volume, attract low-quality users, or undermine long-term unit economics

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The Challenge

After launch, Hibachi needed to increase user acquisition and deepen liquidity across its markets. Incentives were the most direct way to accelerate activity, but introducing rewards came with real constraints that had to be solved upfront:

• Ensure rewards reached real users, not sybil or farming accounts
  
  
• Reward trading behavior aligned with the protocol’s core business goals, not raw volume
  
  
• Set clear limits in time and budget to keep costs predictable
  
  

Without these guardrails, incentives risked increasing noise instead of real usage, while adding operational and engineering overhead the team could not afford.

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The Solution

Rather than building and maintaining an incentives system in-house or relying on one-off trading competitions, Hibachi used Fuul’s no-code incentives infrastructure to deploy a points program, trading competitions, and a multi-level affiliate program.

This allowed the core team to stay focused on the product while using Fuul to control how rewards were earned, distributed, and budgeted. Using Fuul, Hibachi was able to:

• Tie rewards to concrete trading signals such as open interest, trading volume, and realized PnL
  
  
• Set fixed incentive budgets, keeping costs predictable and capital efficient over time
  
  
• Run incentives across multiple seasons to encourage continued participation over time
  
  
• Accelerate growth with a multi-level referral program that rewards users up to 3 levels deep
  
  
• Run transparent competitions through a Fuul Hub, where users could track rewards, rankings, and program rules in one place
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Results

Following the launch of the incentives program, Hibachi observed strong signals across trading activity, capital retention, and user growth:

• Perpetual trading volume increased by ~258% in 2 weeks
  
  
• Daily trading volume increased by over ~900% in 3 weeks
  
  
• Average daily new users increased by ~550%, reflecting a 6.5× acceleration in user acquisition

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Conclusion

Tying rewards to open interest, trading volume, and realized PnL ensured incentives reinforced real trading behavior rather than short-term farming.

Externalizing incentives to Fuul let Hibachi scale trading activity, capital retention, and user acquisition with predictable spend, without diverting engineering time or slowing product execution. The incentives engine drove measurable growth, while the team stayed focused on building the exchange.

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