BitMEX stopped trading at 04:00 UTC on Wednesday, eleven years after it launched the perpetual swap and made 100x leverage a standard crypto product.
Withdrawals remain open, account access remains available, and the company says customer funds are secure. Balances left behind now carry a fee.
What that fee actually is has been reported inconsistently, and for anyone with money still there the difference is large.
What the Fee Actually Is
BitMEX’s closure notice puts it this way. The charge is “1% per annum (charged monthly), or USD 50 equivalent for accounts with no more than this amount.”
Read plainly, that is a 1% annual fee billed in monthly instalments, with a separate provision under which an account holding no more than $50 can be charged $50, taking the balance to nothing. It applies to KYC-verified users who have not withdrawn. The notice does not address post-closure fees for unverified accounts.
Some coverage has rendered this as 1% or $50 per month, whichever is greater. On a $1,000 balance those readings are roughly 83 cents a month against $50 a month, a difference of about sixty times. Anyone with funds at BitMEX should read the notice rather than a summary of it, this one included.
The company has said the fee will rise, without saying by how much. Its wording on that is blunt: failing to withdraw by the closure time “will mean you have agreed to be charged that fee, and have agreed to subsequent increases.” Leaving money there is treated as consent to terms that do not yet exist.
Withdrawals Will Be Slow, and the Phishing Has Started
BitMEX says it is applying additional review procedures to every withdrawal, alongside possible network restrictions, KYC refreshes and cooldown periods. Delays should be expected rather than treated as a problem.
That combination, urgency plus slowness, is what phishing operations wait for. The company has issued a specific warning to “be vigilant for phishing attempts using this news, or promising priority or accelerated withdrawals,” adding that no such expedited service exists. Anyone contacted with an offer to speed up a withdrawal is being targeted.
The Company That Invented Perps
BitMEX launched in 2014 and built the instrument that now underpins most of crypto derivatives trading, the perpetual swap, a futures contract with no expiry. Nearly every venue running perps today is running BitMEX’s idea. The exchange says it never lost customer funds to a security breach.
It announced the wind-down in July, halting new registrations immediately, and from 04:00 UTC on 26 August applied risk limits that let positions be reduced but not opened.
Its later history is a matter of record. The company pleaded guilty to a Bank Secrecy Act violation in 2024 and paid a $100 million penalty. Co-founders Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo and Samuel Reed received presidential pardons in March 2025. Delo has since given £8 million to Reform UK, according to Electoral Commission records.
The sign-off on the closure notice was short. “Thank you to everyone who traded with us. It’s been an honour.”
