On September 15, CoinEx announced that it was shutting down.

The exchange was founded in December 2017 by Yang Haipo, founder of the Bitcoin mining pool ViaBTC. It says it has accumulated more than 10 million users across more than 200 countries and regions and supports over 1,000 crypto assets. There was no hack, no run, and no funding shortfall when it shut down: the company said its reserve ratio exceeded 100%, and withdrawals would remain open through December 22—exactly its ninth anniversary online.

A previous article covered the exits of AscendEX, BitMEX, and BitMart. Since then, BitMart halted trading on August 26, while BitMEX will close on September 23. With CoinEx included, four established exchanges have exited this year. Their reasons for leaving differ, but this latest wave is no longer simply a story of “blowups”—as trading volume and liquidity concentrate among the leaders, while compliance and operating costs continue to rise, mid-sized platforms’ old business models are increasingly unable to clear the new bar for operating.

It Had Cash on the Books—and Still Shut Down

CoinEx’s announcement attributed the decision to three factors: a prolonged market downturn, shrinking industry trading volume and liquidity, and compliance costs that had exceeded reasonable bounds. In an open letter, Yang Haipo said that bearing unlimited risk for limited revenue was no longer rational.

Start with volume. CoinGecko’s second-quarter report shows that trading volume at the ten largest spot exchanges fell from $2.70 trillion in the first quarter to $1.95 trillion, down 27.9%; the ten largest perpetual-futures exchanges still processed $12.7 trillion, down only 10.0%. Volume has not disappeared; it is concentrating at the top. In August 2026, Binance alone accounted for more than 40% of the trading share in CoinMarketCap’s tracked sample, while CoinEx’s 24-hour spot volume was only around tens of millions of dollars.

The retail market is even colder. Average daily Bitcoin spot volume was about $2.2 billion in July, falling to roughly $1.8 billion in August, near a three-year low. Bitcoin is trading around $77,000, compared with a peak near $130,000 last October.

The Stone-Age Business No Longer Works

The four exchanges were born in different years: BitMEX in 2014, AscendEX and CoinEx in 2017, and BitMart in 2018. All were founded during the industry’s early or rapid-expansion phase, growing on bull-market cycles and traffic dividends. Back then, build a matching engine, list enough tokens, and fees and listing charges would follow. The barriers were low—like the Stone Age, when anyone could make the tools.

What is needed now is something different, broadly in three areas.

First is capital scale. DeFiLlama data show that Binance’s reserve assets account for about 58.4% of the total scale of centralized exchanges. Second are licenses. One reason cited when AscendEX shut down was its lack of an EU MiCA license; according to a July snapshot from casptracker.eu, only 16 of the world’s top 100 exchanges by volume held a MiCA license. Third are channels into new lines of business. A TokenInsight report shows that monthly volume in perpetual contracts tied to traditional financial assets rose from $52 billion in January to $268 billion in June, with Binance accounting for roughly 60% in the second quarter.

Crypto researcher Haotian argues that exchanges without the credentials to compete in U.S. equities and tokenized stocks will find it very difficult to survive.

These three factors are more like the copper and tin of the Bronze Age: their sources and trade routes are controlled by a small number of players; everyone else can only attach themselves to them or be acquired. Mid-sized platforms have not necessarily done anything wrong. Their old playbook is simply no longer enough.

How Unlimited Risk Accumulated

Compliance costs are not only the cost of obtaining licenses; they also encompass every past flow of funds.

CoinEx’s history contains many such issues. In February 2023, the New York Attorney General sued it for operating without registration. It agreed to pay about $1.8 million and exit the U.S. market. In September that year, about $70 million was stolen from its hot wallets.

In June this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that some of the funds stolen from Bybit flowed into wallets controlled by Iran’s central bank, and then into CoinEx. TRM Labs data show that since 2018, its fund flows with Nobitex, Iran’s largest exchange, have exceeded $2.7 billion. CoinEx issued a statement that day denying business cooperation with entities linked to the Iranian government. There is currently no evidence that this directly led to the shutdown.

Old matters are also moving forward at BitMEX. On September 12, the litigation administrator for bankrupt lending platform Celsius sued five BitMEX affiliates, seeking to recover approximately 6,360 Bitcoin liquidated on “Black Thursday” in March 2020, worth about $491 million at September 18 prices. These are only the plaintiff’s allegations; the court has not made a determination.

A platform can close, but its legal entities remain, and these matters still need someone to handle them.

The Bronze Age Has Only Just Begun

There are two routes to consolidation. One is closure. Yang Haipo considered selling CoinEx but ultimately decided against it, reasoning that users had deposited their money based on trust in the platform and in him personally, and that this trust should not be transferred along with the shell. The other is acquisition: South Korea’s Mirae Asset Group acquired 97.15% of Korbit for about $102 million; Japan’s SBI successively took a controlling stake in Singapore’s Coinhako and moved forward with its acquisition of Japanese exchange Bitbank; LMAX Group is evaluating a sale, a SPAC merger, or an IPO with Morgan Stanley. The buyers are mostly traditional financial groups, while the targets are mostly regional platforms with local regulatory standing.

The process still appears to be at an early stage. RootData’s list of crypto projects that died in 2026 stood at 290 as of August 24. The same dataset shows that 70 to 100 projects were added each month this year, while more than 200 projects stopped updating each month. The pace of exits is still outstripping the pace of entries.

The next step in the Bronze Age is whether some players are absorbed into larger systems, or whether some, like CoinEx, simply close their doors. Among the mid-sized platforms still operating, outsiders cannot tell which belong to the first group and which to the second. And the money in your account may be sitting at one of them.

  • This content is for reference only and does not constitute investment advice. Markets involve risk; invest with caution.