CoinEx said on Sept. 15 that it will shut down, adding another name to this year’s list of long-running crypto exchanges exiting the market.
The exchange was founded in December 2017 by Yang Haipo, the creator of Bitcoin mining pool ViaBTC. CoinEx said it had accumulated more than 10 million users across over 200 countries and regions and supported more than 1,000 crypto assets. At the time of the shutdown announcement, the company said there had been no hack, no bank-run-style rush for withdrawals and no funding gap. It also said its reserve ratio was above 100%, with withdrawals remaining open until Dec. 22, the date that marks the platform’s ninth anniversary.
AscendEX, BitMEX and BitMart had already been cited in earlier discussion of exchange exits. BitMart stopped trading on Aug. 26, and BitMEX is set to close on Sept. 23. With CoinEx included, four established exchanges have now left the market this year.
The reasons behind those exits are not identical. Still, the latest wave is no longer only a story of collapses. As trading volume and liquidity keep concentrating among the largest venues, and as compliance and operating costs rise, the business model that once sustained mid-sized exchanges is getting harder to defend.
It shut down with money still on the books
CoinEx attributed the decision to three factors: a prolonged weak market, shrinking industry trading volume and liquidity, and compliance costs that had moved beyond a reasonable range. In a public letter, Yang Haipo said it was no longer rational to bear unlimited risk for limited income.
Volume is the first pressure point. CoinGecko’s second-quarter report showed that spot trading volume across the top 10 exchanges fell from $2.70 trillion in the first quarter to $1.95 trillion in the second quarter, a 27.9% drop. The top 10 perpetual futures exchanges still processed $12.7 trillion, down only 10.0%. The volume did not disappear. It moved toward the largest players.
By August 2026, Binance alone accounted for more than 40% of trading share in the sample tracked by CoinMarketCap, according to the article. Over the same period, CoinEx’s 24-hour spot volume was only around tens of millions of dollars.
Retail activity has also cooled. Average daily Bitcoin spot turnover was about $2.2 billion in July and fell to about $1.8 billion in August, close to a three-year low. Bitcoin was trading around $77,000, compared with a peak near $130,000 in October last year.
The old exchange playbook is losing ground
The four exchanges were born in different years but in a similar era of industry expansion: BitMEX in 2014, AscendEX and CoinEx in 2017, and BitMart in 2018. They were built during crypto’s early and fast-growth phase, when bull-market cycles and traffic growth could carry a platform forward. At that stage, building a matching engine and listing enough tokens could generate fee income and listing revenue. The barrier to entry was low.
Now the market demands something else, and the article breaks it into three parts.
- First is capital scale. DeFiLlama data showed Binance’s reserve assets accounted for about 58.4% of the total size of centralized exchange reserves.
- Second is licensing. One of the reasons cited when AscendEX shut down was the lack of a Markets in Crypto-Assets, or MiCA, license in the European Union. According to a July snapshot from casptracker.eu, only 16 of the world’s top 100 exchanges by trading volume had obtained a MiCA license.
- Third is access to new business lines. A TokenInsight report showed that monthly trading volume in perpetual contracts tied to traditional financial assets rose from $52 billion in January to $268 billion in June. Binance accounted for about 60% of that market in the second quarter.
Crypto researcher Haotian said exchanges that are not qualified to compete in U.S. stocks and tokenized equities will, in general, struggle to survive.
The article compares those three requirements to the copper and tin of a new bronze age: the sources and trade routes are controlled by a small number of players, leaving others to attach themselves to larger systems or be absorbed. Mid-sized platforms did not necessarily make obvious mistakes. Their old methods simply no longer cover the new threshold.
How the “unlimited risk” built up
Compliance costs are not limited to the price of obtaining licenses. They also include the legacy of past fund flows.
CoinEx has its own record of such issues. In February 2023, the New York attorney general sued the exchange for operating without registration. CoinEx agreed to pay about $1.8 million and exit the U.S. market. In September of the same year, about $70 million was stolen from its hot wallets.
In June this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that part of the funds stolen from Bybit had moved into wallets controlled by Iran’s central bank and then flowed into CoinEx. TRM Labs data showed that since 2018, CoinEx had more than $2.7 billion in fund flows with Nobitex, Iran’s largest exchange. CoinEx issued a statement the same day denying any commercial relationship with entities tied to the Iranian government. There is currently no evidence showing that this directly caused the shutdown.
BitMEX is also dealing with older legal matters. On Sept. 12, the litigation administrator for bankrupt lender Celsius sued five affiliated BitMEX companies, seeking to recover about 6,360 BTC liquidated during the March 2020 “Black Thursday” event. At Sept. 18 prices, that would be worth about $491 million. That remains an allegation by the plaintiff, and no court has made a finding.
An exchange can close, but the legal entity remains. Those matters still need to be handled.
Consolidation has two paths
One path is closure. Yang Haipo said he had considered selling CoinEx but gave up on the idea. His reason was that users deposited funds based on trust in the platform and in him personally, and that trust should not be transferred together with the shell of the company.
The other path is acquisition. Mirae Asset Group of South Korea bought 97.15% of Korbit for about $102 million. Japan’s SBI acquired control of Singapore-based Coinhako and has been advancing an acquisition of Japanese exchange Bitbank. LMAX Group, meanwhile, has been evaluating a sale, a SPAC merger or a listing together with Morgan Stanley.
Most of the buyers are traditional financial groups, and most of the targets are regional platforms with local regulatory standing.
Exits are still outpacing new arrivals
The process still looks early. RootData’s list of dead crypto projects in 2026 counted 290 names as of Aug. 24. In the same dataset, new projects this year were running at 70 to 100 per month, while more than 200 projects per month had stopped updating.
That means the pace of exits is still faster than the pace of new entries.
The next step in this so-called bronze age may be absorption into larger systems, or a direct shutdown like CoinEx. From the outside, it is still hard to tell which of the mid-sized exchanges that remain open will end up in which camp. For users, that uncertainty is not abstract. Their funds may already be sitting on one of those platforms.
