The exchange told 13 million users it would stop trading on 26 August, four days after firing global CEO Nenter Chow. The BMX token has fallen 81.5 per cent in a week.
BitMart's ownership terminated global chief executive Nenter "Nathan" Chow on Friday, 24 July, and told its community two days later that the exchange itself was closing. Chow said he was not consulted on the decision and learned of the wind-down when it became public, an admission that reframes the entire announcement as a board move rather than a management call.
The mechanics are straightforward. New deposits stopped accepting on 26 July. Trading will fully cease on 26 August. The platform officially winds down on 31 January 2027, giving users roughly six months to withdraw and the operator six months to unwind what remains. The company cited "operating conditions, market environment and future strategic direction" as the reason — language vague enough to answer nothing and specific enough to satisfy no one.
The market read it immediately. BMX, the exchange's native token, fell 81.5 per cent in the seven days after the announcement, trading around $0.057. That is a functionally complete reset of the token's utility premium: it existed to earn fee rebates on an exchange that will no longer take trades in three weeks.
The wallet flows tell a stranger story. Cryptocurrency held in wallets associated with BitMart went from roughly $102 million on 6 July to about $69 million on 27 July, according to on-chain trackers cited by The Block. In the first 24 hours after the announcement, only 58 wallets withdrew — a combined $805,000. Either most users have already left, or a substantial portion of the 13 million account holders BitMart claims across 180 countries are dormant.
The dormant-user reading fits the growth history. BitMart's mid-decade expansion was built on aggressive listings of small-cap tokens that larger exchanges would not touch, and the trading community it attracted was structurally transient. Users came for the newly listed token, traded it, and left. That is a plausible business in a bull market and a hollow customer base in a contraction.
BitMart also carries a specific credibility problem. In December 2021, hackers stole roughly $196 million from the exchange's Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain hot wallets after obtaining private keys. BitMart said it would compensate users out of its own funds, and the US Federal Trade Commission subsequently opened an investigation into whether the company's disclosures were adequate. That investigation is publicly unresolved, and the shutdown means it will now play out against an entity that no longer runs the exchange the FTC was investigating.
The corporate structure amplifies the strangeness. BitMart's operators are Bachi.Tech Corporation and Spread Technologies LLC, and the wind-down announcement did not clarify which entity is responsible for the residual obligations, whether user compensation from 2021 has actually been completed, or which regulator would enforce the eventual liquidation. Chow, who ran the exchange globally, was cut out of the process by whichever of those entities made the call.
This is the third mid-tier centralised exchange to announce closure inside a month. AscendEX shut on 1 July, BitMEX confirmed a September 23 closure of the exchange that invented the perpetual swap, and BitMart now completes the sequence. The three exits are for different reasons — AscendEX cited business conditions, BitMEX cited regulatory drift, and BitMart has yet to cite anything meaningful — but the pattern is real. Second-tier exchanges without a licensing moat or a proprietary trading edge are struggling to justify their operating costs against thin volumes.
The winners are the tier-one venues. Coinbase, Kraken and Binance's licensed regional subsidiaries pick up the users who need somewhere to move, and the tokens listed on the closing exchanges either migrate or die depending on their liquidity elsewhere. BMX has neither an alternative listing venue that matters nor a use case that outlives its parent exchange, which is why its chart looks the way it does.
The unresolved question is what the board actually wants. A managed wind-down over six months preserves optionality for a sale of user data, brand or infrastructure, but the announcement gave no indication that any such transaction is under discussion. In the absence of a stated buyer, the exchange is telling 13 million users to leave, sacking the executive who might have run a sale process, and pointing at market conditions that have not obviously worsened for the sector's larger operators. Whoever made this decision has not explained it, and the person who might have is no longer employed to.
