CoinEx said on Sept. 14 that it will stop its exchange business and move into an orderly shutdown, pointing to three factors: a prolonged downturn in the crypto market, a marked contraction in trading volume and liquidity across the industry, and regulatory requirements, compliance costs and operating uncertainty in major jurisdictions that it said had moved beyond what it considered a reasonable boundary. The company said withdrawals will remain open until 02:00 UTC on Dec. 22, 2026, and added that its reserve ratio is above 100% and user assets are fully backed.
In the notice, CoinEx described the process as an orderly exit and called the statement its final official announcement. It said that any later "supplementary rules" or "policy adjustments" issued in the name of CoinEx should be treated as fraud. Even so, whether users can withdraw on time and in full will depend on how smoothly withdrawal channels operate over the next several months, not only on the wording of the announcement.
Shutdown schedule broken into phases
CoinEx laid out the wind-down as a step-by-step timetable.
Starting Sept. 15, the exchange will stop new user registration, end referral commissions and campaign rewards, and place futures into reduce-only mode. Fiat services, margin, lending, wealth management, staking and strategy trading will no longer accept new subscriptions or new orders. For users still holding futures positions, the window narrows to closing positions only.
On Sept. 22, all non-spot services will be shut down, and on-chain deposits will also close, although CET deposits can continue until Sept. 29. Open futures positions that remain unsettled will be force-settled at the index price. Wealth management and staking products will be redeemed by the platform, with principal and yield moved into users’ spot accounts. Outstanding loans will be handled under existing liquidation rules for collateral. CoinEx also advised users not to make further deposits from now on.
On Sept. 29, spot trading will end, all unfilled spot orders will be canceled, and non-USDT assets will start to be processed. CoinEx Smart Chain, or CSC, and OneSwap will also stop operating that day. Users who want to withdraw assets in their original token form must do so before 02:00 UTC on Sept. 29. After that, tokens with external liquidity will be sold by the platform in batches on outside markets, with the net proceeds converted into USDT and returned to spot accounts. CoinEx said it will not issue a separate notice for each batch. Assets without external liquidity will be delisted gradually, their wallets will no longer be maintained, and the platform will no longer bear custody or redemption responsibility for them.
Dec. 22 is the final withdrawal deadline. Any USDT left unwithdrawn will be transferred into independent custody. Citing Section 5.3 of its user agreement, CoinEx said users must complete withdrawals within 90 days after the account relationship ends. After that, a 5% monthly custody fee will be charged based on the balance at the deadline. Claims must go through the official email channel, and users may be asked to complete identity verification again during the process. The claim deadline is Aug. 22, 2028, after which assets will be handled in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.
CoinEx Wallet and CoinEx Vault were listed separately and are not included in the shutdown of the exchange business.
CET buyback set at 0.005 USDT
CoinEx also said its platform token CET will be repurchased at 0.005 USDT per token.
CET was issued in January 2018. It was first launched as an Ethereum ERC-20 token and was later moved to CoinEx’s in-house blockchain CSC, where it serves as gas. Total issuance stands at 10 billion tokens, with about 7.545 billion already burned and roughly 2.425 billion in circulation. According to the figures cited in the report, CET has fallen back to about $0.005, down about 60% over the past month and more than 90% over the past year.
From Sept. 15 to Sept. 29, the platform will keep placing buy orders on the CET/USDT trading pair at the repurchase price and will waive trading fees on that pair. After Sept. 29, any CET remaining in user accounts will be converted automatically into USDT. No further redemption arrangement will be offered after that.
Nine-year history and a $70 million hack
After the shutdown news emerged, ViaBTC quickly issued a separate statement saying CoinEx’s decision to stop exchange operations would not affect normal mining pool operations. Hashrate access, earnings calculation and distribution, asset withdrawals and customer service will continue as usual. The only change is that the function for automatic withdrawal to CoinEx will be discontinued. ViaBTC said the two businesses serve different use cases, operate independently, keep separate books and manage funds separately.
CoinEx was founded in December 2017 by Haipo Yang. Yang had previously founded mining pool ViaBTC in 2016. His public profile includes a mathematics background from Northwestern Polytechnical University and technical experience at Tencent and Futu. In its early years, CoinEx emphasized its self-developed matching engine and BCH trading pairs. CET was launched two months after the exchange went live and was used for fee discounts, VIP benefits and campaign incentives.
The report said CoinEx was never a first-tier exchange by scale. Instead, it operated as a mid-sized venue backed by mining-pool technical expertise, trying to find room in long-tail tokens and among smaller users. CoinMarketCap’s latest data put its 24-hour spot volume at $54.836 million, while total assets were about $173.84 million. In CoinMarketCap’s exchange monthly reports for May and June 2026, the top 10 by total trading volume included Binance, OKX, Bybit, Gate, MEXC, Bitget, KuCoin and HTX. CoinEx did not make that list.
In September 2023, CoinEx said its risk-control system detected abnormal outflows from multiple hot wallets. The platform later said the root cause was a theft of hot-wallet private keys, with losses of about $70 million. It said the losses would be covered by its user asset security fund and promised 100% compensation for affected users. Deposits and withdrawals were fully paused for a time, after which the exchange replaced deposit addresses in batches and rebuilt its wallet system.
At the time, security firms and media outlets linked the attack to Lazarus, a group associated with North Korea. The report said the incident did not turn into a long-running inability to withdraw funds, but rewriting the hot-wallet architecture itself showed that security and compliance costs for a mid-sized exchange do not fall in line with weaker trading activity. The article did not reach a conclusion on whether the compensation tied to the hack later caused irreversible operating damage.
Even in the week before the shutdown announcement, CoinEx was still delisting trading pairs in line with its usual operating process. From Sept. 8 to Sept. 10, it published several rounds of delisting notices covering dozens of tokens. The report said that even if the shutdown decision had been brewing internally for some time, the outward-facing product line was still moving at a keep-operating pace until the final days.
Regulatory pressure from New York, the EEA and Iran-related scrutiny
CoinEx listed regulatory requirements and compliance costs as one reason for its shutdown. The report said there was clear context behind that claim.
On June 15, 2023, the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a settlement with CoinEx. The platform had not registered in New York as a securities and commodities broker-dealer, and agreed to refund about $1.173 million to 4,691 New York investors while paying a little more than $600,000 in penalties to the state, for a combined amount of roughly $1.7 million. It was also barred from offering securities and commodities trading in New York and required to geoblock New York IP addresses.
In June 2026, CoinEx announced that because the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, or MiCA, had come into full force across the European Economic Area, it would stop serving EEA users on July 1, 2026, and had already halted new registrations from the region. The affected area included all EU member states as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. Withdrawals were still available at that time.
CoinEx also became entangled in Iran-related controversy. On June 25, The Wall Street Journal published an investigation that cited blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs and public on-chain data, saying wallets with identifiable links to Iran had moved more than $3.84 billion through CoinEx since 2019. The report described the platform as one of the key outlets through which Iranian funds reached outside markets. It also said investigators earlier this year traced funds back from two wallets allegedly controlled by Iran’s central bank and found links to roughly $1.5 billion in assets stolen by North Korean hackers from Bybit. After entering Iran-linked wallets, those funds then moved through layered transactions to addresses that included CoinEx.
CoinEx denied the allegations in a statement issued the same day. It said it had never established business cooperation with entities tied to the Iranian government, local exchanges, the Revolutionary Guard or sanctioned parties, and had never proactively provided a funding channel. The company also said it had been placed on an Iranian blacklist as early as 2021 and that its domain had been blocked inside the country, which in its view meant it could not be an official channel.
The report added that 2026 has already seen AscendEX halt operations, followed by BitMEX and BitMart clearing out businesses and pausing withdrawals, with CoinEx now joining that list.
