BITMEX SHUT THE DOORS AT 04:00 UTC — NO DEADLINE TO WITHDRAW, ONLY A METER THAT RUNS

BitMEX stopped trading at 04:00 UTC on September 23. The exchange that shipped the 100x perpetual swap in 2014 is finished, eleven years in, and it warned users back in July. The reason it gives is a strategic review by the board of HDR Global Trading Limited. That is the whole of it. No enforcement action is named in the announcement, and none is named in the coverage either.

Here is the part that matters if you still have coins there. BitMEX has not set a date by which withdrawals close. It set a fee instead. From the July notice: users who have not withdrawn by the closure time are charged an account fee of 1 percent per annum, charged monthly, or 50 dollars equivalent for accounts with no more than that, and the notice says the fee will increase over time if balances are not withdrawn.

So there is no deadline to miss. There is a meter. Leave a balance and it gets smaller on a schedule the exchange sets and says it may change. An open withdrawal window sounds generous until you read who pays for keeping it open. BitMEX says assets exceed liabilities on its proof of reserves page and that it lost nothing to hacks in eleven years. Both of those can be true and your coins can still be sitting on a system you do not control while a fee runs against them.

Move them. Not because BitMEX did anything wrong on the way out, but because an exchange in wind-down is a counterparty with a shrinking reason to care, and the fee is the company telling you so in writing. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $85,553.