- BitMEX ran its final trades at 04:00 UTC on Wednesday, according to Decrypt.
- Withdrawals are still open, but balances left on the exchange now attract a fee.
- This is a planned wind-down rather than a collapse. We could not find a notice from BitMEX itself.
Exchanges usually end loudly. BitMEX has gone the other way: trading stopped at 04:00 UTC on Wednesday, withdrawals are still running, and the only pressure on anyone holding a balance is a fee that was not there last week.
If you still have money on BitMEX, it is now costing you to leave it there. That changes the calculation from “I’ll sort it at the weekend” to something with a running meter on it. Withdrawals from a closing venue also tend to get harder rather than easier as the months pass: support desks shrink, banking partners drop away, and the staff who process the awkward cases move on to other jobs.
And if you have never used BitMEX, you have almost certainly traded something it popularised. The perpetual swap, the contract with no expiry date that now dominates crypto trading volume worldwide, started there.
What we can and cannot confirm
The detail here comes from Decrypt, which reports that trading ended at 04:00 UTC on Wednesday, that users are being urged to withdraw what remains, and that fees now apply to balances left on the exchange. We were not able to find BitMEX’s own published notice, so we cannot tell you the size of that fee, how often it is charged, or whether there is a hard deadline after which withdrawals close. Treat the mechanics as reported rather than verified.
What is clear from the framing is the category this sits in. A wind-down with withdrawals open is a different thing from an insolvency, where withdrawals stop first and the announcement comes second. Nothing in the coverage suggests customer funds are inaccessible.
Our inference, and it is only that: a fee on idle balances is how a closing exchange gets the last few thousand dormant accounts off its books without having to freeze anybody out. It is a nudge with a price on it.
What to do if you still hold a balance
Move it to somewhere you control, either a wallet with your own keys or an exchange you already use. Check the withdrawal minimum before you start, because small balances can sit below the threshold and network fees can eat what is left of them. If that is your situation, converting the dust into a single asset with a low withdrawal minimum is usually the only route out. Our guide to withdrawals covers the common sticking points.
Before the site goes dark, export your full trade history and account statements. HMRC expects you to be able to show cost basis on a disposal, and reconstructing years of leveraged trades from memory once the login stops working is close to impossible. Moving coins between wallets you own is not itself a disposal, but selling or converting on the way out is, and so is closing a position at a profit. Our crypto tax guide has the detail.
The exchange that made leverage normal
BitMEX launched in 2014 and put the perpetual swap into wide use in 2016. The design was the clever part: a futures contract that never expires, held in line with the spot price by a funding payment that traders pay each other every few hours. Every major derivatives venue now runs some version of it.
It also made 100x leverage a mainstream retail product, meaning a 1% move against a position wiped it out entirely. That is the practical reason the name still carries weight, and why bitcoin’s sharper cascades in 2018 and 2019 were so often traced back to a single order book.
UK readers mostly experienced all this second hand. The FCA banned the sale of crypto derivatives to retail consumers in January 2021 and that ban still stands, even though the separate restriction on crypto exchange-traded notes was lifted in 2025. Perpetual swaps have never been a legitimately available retail product here.
Older venues are closing as the rules arrive
BitMEX follows CoinEx, whose wind-down we covered in our recent coverage, and the pattern is becoming familiar. Exchanges built for a period when identity checks were optional are finding the compliance cost of the current period harder to carry than the revenue justifies.
BitMEX’s own turning point came in 2020, when US prosecutors charged its founders over failures to run anti-money-laundering checks. Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo and Samuel Reed pleaded guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations in 2022, the operating company paid a $100m settlement to US regulators, and the exchange introduced mandatory identity verification for all users. Volumes never recovered to where they had been. The four men connected to the case were pardoned in 2025.
Britain’s own regime is still ahead of it. The FCA said last week that its new guidance “will help firms understand how the law underpinning the UK’s future cryptoasset regime applies to their business”, with applications for authorisation opening in September 2026 and the regime itself in force on 25 October 2027.
What to watch
Whether BitMEX publishes a firm withdrawal deadline and the size of the balance fee. Until it does, anyone still holding funds is guessing at how long they have. And whether withdrawals keep clearing smoothly over the next few weeks: a wind-down that stays orderly is unremarkable, and one that does not becomes a very different story.