BitMEX Invented the 100x Perpetual Swap, Beat a Criminal Case With a Presidential Pardon, Then Lost to the Product It Created. Leave Money There Now and It Costs You $50 a Month

In May 2016, BitMEX launched a futures contract that never expired and let you trade at up to 100x leverage. It called it the perpetual swap.

In 2025, crypto perpetual swaps traded $61.7 trillion.

Yesterday at 04:00 UTC, the company that invented them turned off its matching engine for good.

BitMEX didn’t lose to a hack, and it didn’t lose to a regulator. It got a presidential pardon. It lost to the product it created, which Binance, Bybit, OKX and Hyperliquid now sell better.

What Actually Happened

On July 23, the board of BitMEX’s parent company, HDR Global Trading Limited, announced that it would close the exchange “following a strategic review of the business and the broader crypto industry.” New sign-ups stopped that day.

The shutdown came in stages:

• August 26, 04:00 UTC: risk limits applied. Users could only reduce positions, not open new ones.
• September 23, 04:00 UTC: trading and deposits stopped. Any positions still open were closed.
• After closure: users can still log in and withdraw through the website. Several outlets report that API withdrawals end September 28.

BitMEX says it has unstaked every staked BMEX token on the platform, so those tokens are now sitting in holders’ accounts.

The $50-a-Month Catch

If you’re KYC-verified and still have a balance on BitMEX, you now pay to keep it there. The fee is the greater of 1% a year or $50 equivalent, charged monthly, and BitMEX says the fee will rise over time if the funds aren’t withdrawn.

For a small forgotten account, the $50 minimum eats the balance within a few months. If you ever held money on BitMEX, log in on the website today and withdraw.

BitMEX also warns that scammers are offering “expedited” withdrawal help. Its answer: “no such expedited service is available.” Anyone who DMs you offering one is running a scam.

From 57% of the Market to Roughly Zero

At its peak, BitMEX was the main venue for crypto derivatives:

• About 57% of global crypto derivatives market share in 2018–2019
• A record $8 billion traded in one day in July 2018, more than a million bitcoin
• About $1 trillion in annual volume at its 2019 peak

By the time it shut down, 24/7 Wall St estimated its derivatives market share at about 0.08%.

CoinDesk reported the reasons: market makers, whales and liquidity moved to rivals with deeper order books and more listings, both centralized and on-chain. The exchange had also lost key executives weeks before the announcement. BitMEX once had perps to itself. Every exchange now offers them, and Hyperliquid runs them on-chain.

Roshan Dharia, CEO of Echo Base, called the closure part of broader “structural corrections” driven by competition and regulatory costs, and said it “should give every founder and board in this industry pause.”

The Rap Sheet, the Pardon, and the Lawsuit It Leaves Behind

BitMEX’s legal history is as long as its trading history:

• October 2020: the DOJ and CFTC charged the exchange and founders Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo and Samuel Reed with serving US customers without proper registration or anti-money-laundering controls. (HDR is their initials.)
• 2021: BitMEX settled with the CFTC and FinCEN.
• 2022: the three founders and executive Gregory Dwyer were sentenced after pleading guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations.
• July 2024: the company itself pleaded guilty to violating the BSA from 2015 to 2020.
• January 15, 2025: Judge John Koeltl fined BitMEX $100 million.
• March 2025: President Trump pardoned Hayes, Delo, Reed, Dwyer and BitMEX itself. The Guardian reported that the pardon came hours before the $100 million was due.

The pardon didn’t cover civil lawsuits. On September 12, 2026, eleven days before the shutdown, the Celsius bankruptcy estate sued five BitMEX-linked companies in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. It wants back 6,360 BTC, worth roughly $490 million today:

• 1,325.84 BTC of Celsius collateral liquidated on March 12, 2020
• 5,034.33 BTC from investment fund JST liquidated the next day

The estate alleges that BitMEX controlled the price index that triggered the liquidations, the engine that executed them, and the insurance fund that received some of the proceeds. It also says some liquidation sell orders went through more than 24% below the next-best ask. BitMEX went offline on March 13, 2020, and the complaint points out that the liquidations stopped and bitcoin recovered while it was down. These are allegations, not findings, and BitMEX hasn’t lost anything in court.

The exchange is closed, but the companies behind it still have to answer the lawsuit.

Credit Where It’s Due

BitMEX says it lost “zero funds” to hacks in more than 11 years. Few exchanges from 2014 can say that. Its multisig cold storage and once-a-day batched withdrawals were slow and widely mocked, but they worked.

It also created the product that now drives most crypto trading volume. The perpetual swap that every major exchange now lists came from a Seychelles company whose founders later pleaded guilty and then got pardoned.

Why This Matters for Crypto Jobs

BitMEX’s shutdown is one of the clearest signs yet of how the exchange business is consolidating. Here’s what it means for your career:

• Derivatives talent is being released, and snapped up. BitMEX’s matching engine, risk and liquidation engineers built the system everyone else copied. Hyperliquid-ecosystem teams, Bybit, OKX and US derivatives venues like Coinbase Derivatives, Bitnomial and CME all need people who’ve run a perp exchange through a crash like March 2020. If that’s you, you’re in a strong position.
• Liquidation engine design is under legal scrutiny. The Celsius suit targets how liquidations were priced and routed. Every perp venue, centralized or on-chain, now needs quants and engineers who can defend their mark price and insurance fund design in court, as well as build it. Risk and market-structure roles with a legal side are growing.
• Exchange wind-downs are a specialty now. Closing an exchange takes staged risk limits, forced position closes, token unstaking, withdrawal operations, phishing defense and a fee policy for leftover balances. Ops, support and compliance people who’ve done an orderly shutdown have a skill that insolvency firms and exchanges will pay for.
• Having a first-mover advantage doesn’t protect your job. BitMEX created the category and still ended at about 0.08% market share. If you’re at an exchange without deep liquidity or a clear niche, ask leadership in your next all-hands where the order flow is coming from. Your equity depends on the answer.
• Compliance debt comes due eventually. BitMEX spent years paying for its early KYC choices through charges, pleas and fines, and even a pardon didn’t make its problems go away. Exchanges that want US market access are hiring BSA, AML and licensing people aggressively, because nobody wants to be the next case study.

BitMEX is gone, but perps aren’t going anywhere, and neither are the jobs building them. Browse the latest crypto and Web3 jobs on Cryptogrind to find derivatives, trading infrastructure, risk and compliance roles at the exchanges picking up where BitMEX left off.