Some inventions outlive their inventors. BitMEX pioneered the perpetual swap, a financial derivative that allows people to make a bet on an asset's price while using up to 100 times leverage and while being unconstrained by any expiring contracts. Perpetuals went on to become crypto's most copied (and most popular) financial instrument.
However, on July 23, BitMEX said it will close for good on Sept. 23. The reasons for that closure signal a lot about the next few years of crypto.
Image source: Getty Images.
What finished BitMEX off?
During BitMEX's peak in 2018 to 2019, it ran more than half of all crypto derivatives volume, with some days seeing volumes near $8 billion. One of its founders, Arthur Hayes, became one of the crypto industry's biggest opinion leaders during that time, a role that he has since reprised after a brief interlude.
The first major wound his exchange experienced was regulatory in nature, and, all things considered, entirely self-inflicted.
In October 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) charged the exchange's founders, including Hayes, with running an unregistered financial platform and eschewing the use of mandatory anti-money-laundering (AML) controls. That ultimately set off a sequence of events that significantly diminished BitMEX's heft, though it managed to remain a leading exchange for a time.
All three of the founders pleaded guilty. President Donald Trump pardoned them in 2025, but that was long after most of the exchange's serious users fled to rival platforms. Institutional capital typically wants nothing to do with any whiff of regulatory noncompliance.
BitMEX's share of crypto derivatives volume, and especially in futures contracts, had thus been shrinking for years. While the shutdown still comes as a bit of a surprise, it's very unlikely that any single crypto major will be affected much at all.
Who wins?
Because of BitMEX's prolonged decline, the volume it handled diffused to many different exchanges, including leading centralized exchanges like Binance, Kraken, and Coinbase Global (COIN +1.89%).
NASDAQ: COIN
Key Data Points
In terms of benefactors of BitMEX's closure, Coinbase has the deepest moat, and it's unlikely to fall victim to the same regulatory issues, as it's well-established and professionally run.
Binance's Binance Coin (BNB +0.94%) could also be a winner, as it's the utility coin of the Binance Smart Chain, which underpins its exchange. It already runs nearly 39% of centralized spot trading volume, far ahead of the field. The caveat is that getting a defunct competitor's crumbs will probably barely move the needle.
CRYPTO: BNB
Key Data Points
Residual outflows may also benefit decentralized exchanges. Hyperliquid (HYPE +5.27%) leads that pack by a wide margin, trailed by its smaller competitors Aster (ASTER -0.13%) and Lighter (LIT +2.83%). But those platforms are almost certainly still vulnerable to regulatory pitfalls, as their AML and know-your-customer (KYC) requirements are between light and nonexistent.
Nonetheless, two newer arenas are likely to continue pulling capital off older centralized crypto exchanges and into new (and often decentralized) venues that offer different capabilities.
CRYPTO: HYPE
Key Data Points
Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket set volume records during the 2026 World Cup, clearing tens of billions in one month, suggesting that outcome markets are a major recipient of flows of speculative (or outright gambling) capital. Separately, asset tokenization, which refers to recording ownership of real-world assets (RWAs) like Treasury bills on-chain, is another area of growing on-chain value.
So the features that attract capital are shifting, and with that, the platforms and exchanges discussed above are pivoting to try to capture as many of the flows as they can. That doesn't mean you need to be racing to buy or sell anything as a result of BitMEX's closure. Crypto exchanges come and go, and the current trend is for them to be going out of business and consolidating, as crypto is in a bear market.
