All non-spot services will be closed on September 22, and the platform token will be repurchased at 0.005 USDT each.

Written by: Ma He, Foresight News

On September 14, the cryptocurrency trading platform CoinEx announced that after assessment, it decided to cease exchange operations and enter an orderly shutdown. The reasons given by the platform are threefold: the long-term downturn in the crypto market, significant contraction in industry trading volume and liquidity, and that the regulatory requirements and compliance costs from major jurisdictions, as well as operational uncertainties, have exceeded what it considers to be "reasonable boundaries." The announcement specified that withdrawal services will be retained until December 22, 2026, at 02:00 (UTC), and claimed a reserve rate exceeding 100%, with user assets fully allocated.

The announcement characterized itself as an orderly exit, while also stating "the last official announcement" in the main text— thereafter, any "supplementary rules" or "policy adjustments" appearing in the name of CoinEx will be regarded as fraud. Whether users can withdraw their assets in a timely and complete manner will depend on whether the withdrawal channels are smooth in the next three months, and not merely on the statement.

All non-spot services will close on September 22, and platform tokens will be repurchased at 0.005 USDT each

The exchange's shutdown will unfold step by step according to the timeline.

Starting September 15: New user registrations will be stopped; referral commissions and activity rewards will be suspended; contracts will only allow for position reduction; fiat, leverage, lending, financial products, staking, and strategic trading will no longer accept new subscriptions or new orders. For those still holding contract positions, the window has narrowed to "only closing, no opening."

On September 22: All non-spot services will close; on-chain deposits will be closed (CET deposits can be extended to September 29). Unclosed contract positions will be forcibly settled at the index price; financial products and staking will be redeemed uniformly by the platform, with principal and earnings entering the spot account; unreturned loans will be handled according to existing clearing rules for collateral. The announcement also advised users "to avoid additional deposits from now on."

On September 29: Spot trading will close, and unfulfilled spot orders will be canceled; non-USDT assets will begin processing; CoinEx Smart Chain (CSC) and OneSwap will simultaneously cease operations. Users wishing to withdraw assets in the original token form must complete the operation by 02:00 (UTC) on September 29. After that, assets with external liquidity will be sold by the platform in batches on external markets, converted into USDT, and returned to the spot account, and "no separate announcements will be made for each batch"; assets without external liquidity will be gradually delisted and wallets will no longer be maintained, and the platform will no longer bear custody or repayment responsibilities.

On December 22: Withdrawal will be cut off. Unwithdrawn USDT will be transferred to independent custody. The announcement cited Article 5.3 of the user agreement, stating that after account relationships are terminated, users should complete their withdrawals within 90 days; overdue amounts will incur a monthly custody fee of 5% based on the balance at the cutoff time. Claims must go through the official email, and the process may require re-verification of identity. The deadline for claims is August 22, 2028, after which they will be disposed of according to applicable regulations.

It is worth mentioning that CoinEx Wallet and CoinEx Vault are separately excluded from this exchange shutdown.

Its platform token will also be repurchased at 0.005 USDT each.

The platform token CET was issued in January 2018, initially as an Ethereum ERC-20 format token, later migrated to the self-developed blockchain CSC for gas purposes. Its total issuance is 10 billion, approximately 7.545 billion have been destroyed, and about 2.425 billion are in circulation. Currently, its price has returned to around 0.005 USD, with a decline of about 60% in the past month and over 90% in the past year.

From September 15 to 29, the platform will continuously place buy orders at the repurchase price for the CET/USDT trading pair and waive trading fees for this trading pair; after the 29th, any remaining CET in the account will be automatically converted into USDT, and no additional redemption arrangements will be provided thereafter.

Nine years of development history, previously hacked $70 million

After the shutdown news broke, ViaBTC quickly issued a statement saying that CoinEx's decision to stop exchange operations will not affect the normal operation of its mining pool; hash power access, earnings calculation and distribution, asset withdrawals, and customer service will continue as usual. The only adjustment is the cessation of the "automatic withdrawal to CoinEx" function. ViaBTC emphasized that the two are independent operations, independent accounting, and funds managed separately. This is equivalent to publicly cutting off brand-related risks, preventing miners from treating the mining pool wallet and exchange account as the same set of funds.

CoinEx was founded in December 2017 by Haipo Yang. Yang previously founded the mining pool ViaBTC in 2016, with public experience including a mathematics background from Northwestern Polytechnical University and technical experience at Tencent and Futu. The early product narrative emphasized self-developed matching and BCH trading pairs, with CET launched two months after going online for fee discounts, VIPs, and activity incentives.

It has never been a top exchange but rather a medium-sized platform that found space among long-tail cryptocurrencies and small to medium users relying on a mining pool technical background.

According to the latest data from CoinMarketCap, its trading volume over the past 24 hours was $54.836 million, and its total assets are approximately $173.84 million.

In terms of scale, it has never consistently entered the top tier of global trading volume. The total trading volume in the top ten of CoinMarketCap's exchange monthly reports for May and June 2026 included Binance, OKX, Bybit, Gate, MEXC, Bitget, KuCoin, HTX, etc.; CoinEx did not make the list.

In September 2023, CoinEx's risk control system detected multiple abnormal outflows from hot wallets. The platform later stated that the root cause was the theft of hot wallet private keys, resulting in a loss of about $70 million, and committed to covering the losses through a "User Asset Security Fund," providing 100% compensation to affected users. Withdrawals and deposits were temporarily halted, and then the deposit addresses were changed in batches, and the wallet system was rebuilt.

Security institutions and media at the time linked the attack to the North Korean-associated organization Lazarus. This incident did not escalate into a "bank run" where assets could not be withdrawn, but the rewriting of the hot wallet architecture itself indicates that security and compliance costs for medium-sized exchanges do not decrease year-on-year despite declining trading volumes. Whether the compensation from this hacker incident results in irreversible operational losses remains to be seen.

A week before the shutdown, the exchange was still routinely delisting trading pairs according to standard procedures— from September 8 to 10, multiple groups of delisting announcements were issued, covering dozens of cryptocurrencies. This demonstrates that even though the decision to cease operations had been brewing internally for a long time, the external product line was still clearing illiquid assets at a "we still want to continue operations" pace up until the last few days.

Regulatory pressure

The announcement listed "regulatory requirements and compliance costs" as one reason for the shutdown, which is not unfounded.

On June 15, 2023, the New York Attorney General Letitia James's office announced a settlement with CoinEx: the platform had not registered as a securities and commodities broker in New York, agreeing to refund about $1.173 million to 4,691 New York investors, and to pay a penalty of around $600,000 to the state government, totaling about $1.7 million; at the same time, it is prohibited from offering securities and commodities trading in New York and implementing geographic blocking for New York IPs.

In June 2026, CoinEx announced that due to the full implementation of the EU's "Regulation on Crypto-Assets" (MiCA) in the European Economic Area, it will stop services for EEA users on July 1, 2026, and has already stopped new registrations in that region. The affected area includes all EU member states, as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway. Withdrawals were still open at the time. From New York to the European Economic Area, the compliance radius is shrinking, and the user base it can service is diminishing.

Additionally, CoinEx has also been embroiled in issues related to Iran. On June 25, The Wall Street Journal published an investigation citing blockchain analysis firm TRM Labs and on-chain public data stating: since 2019, transactions involving wallets with identifiable links to Iran have circulated through CoinEx, exceeding $3.84 billion, making the platform one of the significant outlets for Iranian funds to the external market. The report also mentioned that investigators earlier this year traced back funds from two wallets allegedly controlled by the Iranian central bank, finding connections to the asset theft of around $1.5 billion from Bybit by North Korean hackers; after entering the Iranian side wallets, the funds were transmitted through multiple layers of transactions to addresses including CoinEx.

However, CoinEx issued a statement the same day denying any involvement, claiming it has never established commercial cooperation with Iranian government-related entities, domestic exchanges, the Revolutionary Guard, or sanctioned parties, nor has it proactively provided funds channels; and stressed that it was listed on Iran's official blacklist as early as 2021, with its domain blocked domestically, thus lacking the basis to become an "official channel."

Since 2026, first AscendEX suspended operations, followed by BitMEX and BitMart cleaning up and suspending withdrawals, and now CoinEx has also reached this point. The brutal reshuffling of cryptocurrency exchanges may still be ongoing.