To børser, én dårlig måned: BitMart slutter seg til BitMEX i nedleggelsen

BitMart told its users on July 26 that it's closing. Nine years of trading, gone in one weekend notice.

The exchange stopped taking new signups and deposits at 01:30 UTC that day, moved futures accounts to reduce-only, and cut off new spot orders. Trading itself keeps running until August 26, when everything stops for good. Full closure, the point where BitMart ceases to exist as a company, is set for January 31, 2027. BitMart's own announcement blamed "operating conditions, market environment, and future strategic direction." Read into that whatever you want.

The market didn't wait for a reason. BMX, the exchange's token, dropped as much as 70% within hours and has fallen roughly 81% over the past week, trading near $0.057 according to CoinGecko. It sat above $0.30 just a few days before the announcement leaked.

Here's the part that should worry anyone with funds still on the platform: on-chain sleuth Lookonchain found that only 58 wallets managed to withdraw anything in the 24 hours after the notice, about $805,000 total and there was an eight-hour stretch where nothing moved at all. BitMart says withdrawals are still open. The chain tells a slower story. Users have been posting on X about withdrawals stuck in "on-chain withdrawal freeze" status despite getting confirmation emails, though those individual complaints haven't been independently verified.

Then there's the CEO situation, which somehow got messier. Former BitMart Global CEO Nenter Chow said on X that he learned about the shutdown from the same public announcement everyone else did, he'd already been told on July 24 that he was being pushed out, two days before the wind-down notice went live. Whatever's happening inside BitMart, it isn't a company that's talking to itself.

None of this is happening in isolation. Four days earlier, on July 23, BitMEX, the exchange Arthur Hayes co-founded back in 2014 and the one that invented the 100x leverage perpetual swap everyone in crypto now trades — announced it's closing too. BitMEX's statement called the decision "a very heavy heart" moment after 11 years, pointing to a strategic review rather than any specific failure. BMEX, its token, cratered more than 90% within hours, taking its market cap down to something like $497,000. BitMEX plans to force-close any positions still open when it shuts the doors on September 23.

BitMart's 2021 hack is the ghost in the room here, even though the company never mentioned it. Hackers pulled roughly $196 million out of two hot wallets back in December that year, one of the biggest exchange breaches on record at the time. BitMart used its own money to cover the losses and kept operating for another five years. A $200 million hole in your balance sheet is the kind of thing that doesn't heal so much as get patched over, and patches eventually give out.

Add AscendEX, which closed on July 1, and EXMO, which started winding down this month after landing on the UK's Russia sanctions list, and that's four established centralized exchanges gone in under a month. None of them are obscure. None of them got hacked this time.

The usual line is that the house always wins. Three exchanges down in a month is a strange way to prove it wrong.