CoinEx Winds Down and Gives Users Until 22 December to Withdraw

CoinEx will stop operating. The Hong Kong-founded exchange said on Tuesday that it is closing in stages, with spot trading ending on 29 September and withdrawals cut off on 22 December. Founder and chief executive Haipo Yang published the notice himself and gave thinning volume and rising compliance costs as the reasons. He said he had turned down the alternative of selling the business. Nine years of trading now end on a calendar.

Three months, four cutoffs

The wind-down is staged, and the dates are the part users have to act on. New registrations stopped on Tuesday and futures moved to reduce-only, meaning open positions can be closed but no new ones taken. Non-spot services and on-chain deposits end on 22 September. Spot trading stops a week after that, and the buyback of CET, CoinEx's own exchange token, closes with it at $0.005 a token with no trading fee charged. Finance Magnates and The Crypto Times carry that schedule identically. The withdrawal deadline is 22 December, though the two accounts differ on the hour: The Crypto Times puts the cutoff at 02:00 UTC and Finance Magnates gives the date alone.

What happens to money left behind sits in one account only. The Crypto Times reports that USDT still on the platform after the deadline moves into independent custody carrying a 5% monthly fee, with claims on it running until August 2028. No other outlet in this sweep mentions the arrangement. It stands unverified.

Yang's own accounting

The "security and compliance risks of running a crypto exchange have become increasingly difficult to contain," Yang said in the notice CoinDesk carried on Tuesday morning.

CoinDesk also reports that he rejected a sale, in his words because "a clean ending is the right ending". Finance Magnates gives a longer version of the same reasoning: a prolonged market downturn, thinner liquidity, shrinking volume and regulatory costs the business could no longer carry. Yang acknowledged in that account that CoinEx had not become a top-tier venue. One sentence appears word for word in both outlets, which is that carrying unlimited risk for limited revenue is no longer a rational choice.

Two volumes, two founding dates

The accounts do not agree on how big CoinEx was at the end. CoinDesk puts 24-hour trading volume at about $70 million, citing CoinGecko. Finance Magnates puts daily volume at roughly $58 million and names no source for it. Neither figure is offered as superseding the other and they do not reconcile. The two also disagree on when the exchange started: CoinDesk says CoinEx launched on 15 September 2017, which would put Tuesday's notice exactly nine years on, while The Crypto Times dates the founding to December 2017. Both call the run nine years.

The solvency claim comes from the company. CoinEx says its reserve ratio is above 100% and that every user balance is available to withdraw. Two outlets report the claim and neither cites an attestation from anyone outside the exchange. Users have three months to test it. CoinEx Wallet and CoinEx Vault are separate products and keep running, according to The Crypto Times.

An industry counting its exits

CoinEx has been through a regulator before. It paid $1.7 million in 2023 to settle a case brought under New York's Martin Act, the state securities law, refunded about $1.1 million to investors there and agreed to stop serving the state. Tuesday's notice is not the first exit date published this year either. BitMEX and BitMart announced shutdowns three days apart in July, and Finance Magnates counts close to 100 crypto projects wound down since January. That tally lists closure dates where CoinDesk's shorter list gives announcement dates, so the two are not measuring the same thing.

Not every retrenchment goes this far. Bitcoin Suisse cut up to half its Swiss staff this month and kept trading. What CoinEx has not said is how much of its users' money is still on the platform, or what becomes of anyone who misses December.