CoinEx Is Shutting Down After 9 Years And It’s Not Alone
A profitable-looking exchange with a 100%+ reserve ratio just decided the business isn’t worth running anymore
On September 15, 2026, CoinEx announced it is closing for good. Not because it ran out of money. Not because it got hacked. The exchange says its reserve ratio still exceeds 100%, meaning it holds more in assets than it owes its users. By the usual measure of exchange health, CoinEx looks fine.
And yet, after almost nine years in business, it’s shutting down anyway.
That contradiction is worth sitting with, because it says something bigger about where the mid-tier crypto exchange business is heading in 2026.
The Timeline: Four Stages to Zero
CoinEx isn’t disappearing overnight. It’s winding down in four clearly marked stages, giving users months of runway to get their funds out:
- September 15 — New registrations and referral rewards stop. Futures contracts move into reduce-only mode, meaning traders can close positions but not open new ones.
- September 22 — Margin trading, crypto lending, staking, Earn products, and futures trading all shut off. Most on-chain deposit addresses are disabled, with CET deposits as the main exception.
- September 29 — Every spot trading pair closes. CoinEx’s own blockchain infrastructure, CoinEx Smart Chain and OneSwap, stops running entirely. Any CET tokens still sitting in user accounts get automatically repurchased at 0.005 USDT each, with no cap on quantity.
- December 22 — Withdrawals close. This is the true end date.
After that final date, any USDT users haven’t claimed doesn’t just vanish — it moves into independent custody, though a 5% monthly fee starts eating into the original balance. Users get a long window to reclaim it: custody claims stay open until August 2028. Still, CoinEx has been blunt about the incentive here — withdraw now, because waiting until the deadline risks network congestion and needless fees.
Founder Haipo Yang framed the decision in stark terms, saying carrying unlimited risk for limited revenue is no longer a rational choice. He said he’d considered simply selling the exchange to someone else, but rejected that path in favor of an orderly wind-down that lets users walk away with everything they’re owed.
Why an Exchange With Full Reserves Still Folds
CoinEx launched in December 2017 and rode out several full market cycles without ever breaking into the top tier of trading venues — think Binance or Coinbase territory. That was survivable when volumes were healthy. It stopped being survivable after the market downturn that began in October 2025.
Get Cryptothreads.io’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
By the time of the shutdown announcement, CoinEx’s daily trading volume had fallen to roughly $58 million, against total platform assets of $173 million. That’s a business generating a shrinking trickle of fee revenue while still carrying the full weight of running a global exchange.
Regulation piled onto that pressure rather than easing it. In June 2026, CoinEx pulled out of the European Economic Area entirely once the EU’s MiCA framework took effect — the compliance bar had simply gotten too high to clear profitably. That same month, blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs flagged sizable Iran-linked on-chain activity touching CoinEx addresses. The exchange denied any commercial relationship with sanctioned parties and said it was tightening its geofencing and monitoring systems, but the episode added yet another layer of operational risk to an already strained business.
There’s also history here. Back in September 2023, CoinEx suffered a hot wallet breach of roughly $54 million, later traced by on-chain investigators to North Korea’s Lazarus Group — the same actors behind some of crypto’s largest thefts. Affected users were made whole. That same year, CoinEx exited the U.S. market after settling with the New York Attorney General, returning $1.1 million to investors and paying over $600,000 in penalties.
None of these were individually fatal. Together, they describe an exchange that kept absorbing costs — security, legal, regulatory — without the trading volume to offset them.
CoinEx Isn’t a One-Off
2026 has quietly become a graveyard year for mid-tier exchanges:
- BitMEX confirmed its shutdown on July 23, 2026, with operations fully ending by September 23.
- BitMart is closing in phases, targeting full closure by January 31, 2027.
- Bitget has already stopped onboarding new users from Japan as of August 2026.
The pattern behind all of them is the same. Most of these exchanges built their businesses during the 2020–2021 bull run, when trading volumes were high enough to comfortably fund compliance operations across multiple jurisdictions. That math has since inverted. Volumes have cooled since 2022, while regulatory demands have only intensified — MiCA in Europe, tougher enforcement across Asia, and rising costs tied to sanctions screening. Fixed costs went up right as revenue went down, and something had to give.
The Takeaway
What sets CoinEx’s exit apart isn’t that it’s happening — it’s how it’s happening. A four-stage public timeline, an explicit reserve confirmation, a defined CET repurchase mechanism, and a multi-year custody window for anyone who misses the deadline. Compared to how most exchange closures play out, users here are getting an unusually long runway and an unusually clear picture of what’s coming next.
That doesn’t make it less of a warning sign, though. If an exchange with fully backed reserves and nearly a decade of operating history can conclude the math no longer works, it’s a fair bet CoinEx won’t be the last name on this list before the year is out.
Users still holding funds on CoinEx should not wait for the December 22 deadline — early withdrawal avoids both network congestion and the fees that kick in once unclaimed assets move to custody.
