After almost nine years of operation, after being served a cease and desist notice on September 14, new registrations have been suspended since September 15, and CoinEx’s futures markets have enter reduce-only mode, meaning customers cannot open or increase their futures positions, but can only reduce or close their positions.
The exchange cited a prolonged bear market in cryptocurrency, lower trading volume and liquidity across the industry, and rising regulatory and compliance expenses as the reasons.
CoinEx also said uncertainty in its operations had become intolerable. The announcement did not reference any regulatory enforcement action, lawsuit, or court order as the immediate trigger for the closure.
These services would be ended before spot trading. All fiat services and products, margin trading, loans, Earn service, staking, and strategic trading were suspended on 15 September. Futures positions can be reduced until Sept. 22, when any unliquidated positions will be settled to the index prices.
ViaBTC also announced a variety of changes, stating features including “Withdrawal to CoinEx” would cease to be supported on the same date.
CoinEx also planned to discontinue its futures, fiat, margin, lending, Earn, staking, strategic trading and OnChain products as of 22 September. Most of the blockchain deposits were also planned to end on that date, although CET ones will be processed until 29 September. Spot trading will cease on Sept. 29, with outstanding orders being canceled.
Those who hold cryptocurrencies and want to withdraw them in their original form, before the remaining funds are exchanged by CoinEx, have until 02:00 UTC on Sept. 29 to do so. If the tokens have sufficient liquidity outside of CoinEx, they are sold according to net proceeds and converted to USDT▼$0.9996. Tokens without external liquidity could be delisted and the wallets stopped supporting them.
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The exchange has also announced buying back CET, a token that is part of CoinEx’s ecosystem. The buyback order of 0.005 USDT worth of CET was supposed to continue until 29 September. CoinEx waived the CET/USDT trade fees for the buyback.
Remaining CET balances in customer accounts were automatically bought back at the buyback price. CoinEx Smart Chain and OneSwap are also to be terminated on September 29.
Withdrawals from centralized exchanges remained open until 02:00 UTC on 22 December. CoinEx claimed that any USDT remaining in centralized exchanges after this point would be held in segregated custody and incur a monthly fee of 5% of the balance at that point in time. Customers could then make claims on remaining funds, with a final deadline of 22 August 2028.
After encountering regulatory and security issues during its history, CoinEx reached a settlement in 2023 with the New York Attorney General, committing to refund investors and cease operations for U.S. customers. The same year, CoinEx was also subject to a hot wallet breach, with security researchers estimating losses at $70 million.
According to CoinEx, customer assets are over 100% backed with reserves. CoinEx has a proof-of-reserves system that allows customers to verify whether their account balance is included in the company’s snapshot of total reserves taken from CoinEx’s wallets via the use of a Merkle tree data structure.
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The closure of the exchange did not affect CoinEx Wallet and CoinEx Vault, which the company states are operated as separate services and will continue to operate as normal under their respective terms after the centralized exchange wind-down.
