BitMEX
2.1/10 total
The venue that invented the perpetual swap and once held most of the crypto derivatives market is shutting down. On 23 July 2026 it notified users that the exchange closes on 23 September 2026 at 04:00 UTC, following a strategic review by parent HDR Global Trading Limited; new registrations have already stopped and from 26 August 2026 the platform goes reduce-only. If you have a balance there, the only correct action is to withdraw it. This is the same venue that made KYC mandatory for every existing user in late 2020, immediately after the CFTC and DOJ actions, having built its business on not asking.
Scores
Weights are published in the method and applied identically to every entry.
For
- Says its proof of reserves covers customer liabilities and that withdrawals stay open after trading ends
- Gave users two months of notice with published dates rather than freezing withdrawals without warning
- Twelve years of operation with no breach of customer funds on the scale of its peers
- Well-documented API that made it the reference venue for derivatives bots for years
Against
- Closing on 23 September 2026: do not deposit, and withdraw anything you have there
- Reduce-only from 26 August 2026, with remaining positions progressively force-closed before shutdown
- Balances left after closure are charged $50 per month or an annualised 1% levy
- Flipped from no-KYC to mandatory verification for all existing users in 2020, pulling the deadline forward to 5 November 2020 after the CFTC and DOJ charges landed
- Parent company HDR Global pleaded guilty to a Bank Secrecy Act offence and was fined $100 million in January 2025; the founders and the company were pardoned in March 2025
Agent access 2/10
The API still works but the venue is in wind-down and stops trading on 23 September 2026, so building anything against it is wasted effort.
Reported separately and not counted in the total. It measures what an autonomous agent can do unattended, not whether the service is safe to use.
Fees
winding down, see note
Not worth quoting a base-tier trading fee: the venue closes on 23 September 2026. The number that matters is the post-closure charge BitMEX announced for balances left behind, a maintenance fee of $50 per month or an annualised 1% levy on assets.
Specification
- Type
- Custodial exchange
- KYC policy
- KYC required
- Custody model
- custodial
- Account required
- yes
- Assets
- 100+
- Chains
- 1
- Operating since
- 2014
- Jurisdiction
- Seychelles
- Onion service
- no
- Works without JS
- no
- Open source
- no
- Facts checked
- 2026-07-31
Links
Plain links, no referral parameters. Verify the domain yourself; phishing clones of every service in this table exist.