CoinEx told users on September 15 that it is closing permanently after nearly nine years of operation, citing a prolonged market downturn, falling trading volume and rising compliance costs. New registrations stopped immediately, and the exchange will switch off completely on December 22, 2026.
The announcement starts an orderly wind-down rather than an abrupt failure. CoinEx says its reserve ratio exceeds 100 percent, meaning user assets are fully withdrawable, and it has pointed users to its proof-of-reserves page for verification. Withdrawals stay open from today until the December 22 deadline, a window of just over three months.
The company framed the decision as a response to conditions that have built up over two years. Trading volume across the industry has thinned as the bear market dragged on, and the Fear and Greed Index readings cited in the announcement sit deep in negative territory. At the same time, licensing and reporting requirements in major jurisdictions keep raising the fixed cost of running a global venue. CoinEx did not name a single trigger, and its statement reads like the end of a long internal argument rather than a reaction to one bad month.
The closure also removes one of the last exchanges from the cohort that launched during the 2017 boom and survived every cycle since. That cohort has been shrinking steadily, and each exit takes with it a set of trading pairs, liquidity pools and token ecosystems that smaller projects relied on.
The shutdown timeline
The schedule runs in stages. On September 15, new sign-ups stop, futures trading moves to reduce-only mode and referral rewards end. A week later, on September 22, all non-spot services shut down: loans, staking, earn products and on-chain deposits, with CET deposits as the only exception.
Spot trading ends on September 29. On the same day, the exchange will automatically buy back any leftover CET, its native token, at 0.005 USDT each with no quantity cap and no extra conditions. CoinEx’s Smart Chain and OneSwap close that day too. From then until December 22, only withdrawals remain available, after which the platform shuts for good and any assets left on it become unreachable.
The staged approach gives different product lines different exit paths. Futures holders get nearly two weeks to unwind. Staking and earn users get a week after that. Spot traders keep a market until September 29 so they can convert holdings rather than withdrawing illiquid tokens. The design suggests lawyers were in the room: each stage reduces the exchange’s open obligations before the next one closes.
CET rises as its exchange dies
The buyback floor produced a strange market reaction. CET traded near $0.005 on Tuesday, up about 3.6 percent in a day, because the guaranteed repurchase price props up the token. CoinMarketCap put CET’s market cap near $3.54 million on volume of roughly $58.5 million across the venue, against total platform assets of about $173.7 million.
The longer picture is less kind. CET has lost 76 percent of its value this year and fell nearly 35 percent in the week before the announcement. At the buyback price it sits about 97 percent below its July 2018 peak of $0.15. BeInCrypto’s markets desk recorded CET at $0.00466 on Tuesday, roughly 7 percent under the repurchase level, which leaves a narrow arbitrage for holders willing to wait for the September 29 auto-buyback. The monthly repurchase and burn program ran as usual in August, retiring more than 19.2 million CET on September 2, so the token’s supply had already been shrinking before the closure news landed.
Token buybacks at closure are rare in crypto. More often, exchange tokens simply go to zero when the venue dies, as holders of smaller platform tokens learned repeatedly in past cycles. CoinEx’s choice to honor its original listing price, from December 2017, is a gesture toward its earliest users, and it costs the company little because the token’s float has been burned down for years.
A rough year for mid-tier exchanges
CoinEx is not alone. BitMEX will end all operations on September 23 at 04:00 UTC, a closure its owner HDR Global Trading confirmed in July after freezing new sign-ups and telling users to close positions early. BitMart is shutting in phases with full closure set for January 31, 2027, and users have already raised concerns about withdrawal speed. Bitget stopped onboarding new Japanese users on August 3, citing the local regulatory environment.
Four retreats in a single year marks a clear pattern. Bear-market volume has thinned fee income across the industry, while licensing and compliance requirements in major jurisdictions keep raising fixed costs. Smaller venues that once competed on listings and leverage now face a bill they cannot pay with shrinking revenue. Larger exchanges with banking relationships and diversified income have held their ground, so the shakeout is concentrated exactly where user protections matter most.
What CoinEx users should do
The exchange advises users to withdraw funds well before the deadline rather than waiting for the final days. Assets left after December 22 will have no withdrawal path, and support queues historically jam in the last week of any closure window. Traders with open futures positions should close or reduce them now, since the book is already in reduce-only mode and liquidation-only mechanics will apply from September 22. Users of staking and earn products have until September 22 to unwind positions and move the proceeds off-platform.
CoinEx launched on December 22, 2017, and spent years as a mid-tier venue with a global retail base and a token that funded its ecosystem. Its exit from the United States in 2023, under a settlement with then-New York Attorney General Letitia James that returned more than $1.1 million to state investors and added over $600,000 in penalties, was an early sign of the regulatory squeeze that now shapes its end. The 2018 hack, in which attackers drained roughly $70 million from hot wallets, had already pushed the exchange to overhaul its custody setup years before this announcement.
The company has not said what happens to its staff or whether any technology will be licensed elsewhere. For now the message is simple: the doors close on December 22, and the exit is open until then.