CoinEx earns CZ praise as exchange begins wind down process as profitability trails operating costs

Haipo Yang, the founder of CoinEx, has confirmed on X that the crypto trading platform will be shutting down after nine years of operation. The exchange pointed to a long market slump and rising compliance costs as part of its reasons to cease operations.

It also says its reserves cover more than 100% of customer balances and that users can pull their funds through December 22, 2026.

Withdrawals stay open until December 22

The shutdown has been scheduled to happen in phases.

The company shared in an official announcement where it stated that new account registrations, referral commissions and reward payouts stopped the same day of the announcement.

Futures markets have been moved into Reduce-Only mode, meaning traders can only close existing positions.

CoinEx has also stopped taking fresh orders for fiat, margin, loans, staking and its various Earn and Strategic trading products.

September 22 has been set as the day non-spot services will be ending entirely with spot trading closing in September. At that point the platform says that it will start converting non-USDT holdings and buy back any leftover CET, its exchange token, at 0.005 USDT per coin.

The withdrawal window itself stays open until December 22, when the platform goes dark for good.

Why is CoinEx closing shop?

CoinEx tied the reason to wind down operations to multiple factors, first of which is the prolonged downturn in the cryptocurrency market. It added that the contraction of trading volume and liquidity across the industry, and the “continuously rising regulatory requirements across major jurisdictions,” as part of the reasons it has decided to cease operations.

The company said that compliance and operational costs had climbed past what it considered reasonable.

The exchange maintains a reserve rate above 100% that is verifiable through a Merkle-tree proof-of-reserves system that lets users confirm if the platform holds at least as much on-chain as it owes them. Every user asset, CoinEx said, is fully backed and available for withdrawal.

CZ contrasts the exit with Quadriga

Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao “CZ” weighed in shortly after the announcement. “The few recent wind-downs during this winter have allowed users to withdraw their assets,” he wrote on X, calling it “a sharp contrast to the ‘QuadrigaCx styles’ in the previous cycles.”

QuadrigaCX, once Canada’s largest crypto exchange, imploded after founder Gerald Cotten died in India in December 2018, taking with him the keys to roughly $135 million in customer crypto.

Investigators later discovered that Cotten was running the platform like a Ponzi scheme and was treating deposits as a personal slush fund. Tens of thousands of users never recovered their money.

A founder who resisted the US stock rush

A few months before the shutdown announcement, Yang made it clear that he was in no hurry to introduce one of the trends reshaping the sector into CoinEx.

This trend is the addition of US equities trading to crypto exchanges, and it was mostly done to boost revenue streams as crypto volumes softened, and also offer users more options.

In an X post made in June, Yang said the deal looks bad for crypto exchanges when it is broken down.

Yang called the economics of crypto platforms plugging into US stock trading hard to justify from a compliance, user and revenue point of view.

Another exit in a brutal year for exchanges

CoinEx joins a growing list of platforms bowing out or freezing up in 2026. BitMEX said in July it would close on September 23 after its parent, HDR Global Trading Limited, failed to find a buyer, ending an 11-year run for the venue that popularized the perpetual swap.

BitMart is another exchange that has shut down, but there is a building controversy in terms of how it has been handling the process. Users have not been able to withdraw while the exchange hired restructuring firm Alvarez & Marsal and pledged to bring in an independent overseer. It has yet to publish a proof-of-reserves report it promised in May.

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