CoinEx to Shut Down After Nine Years and Buy Back Its CET Token at 0.005 USDT

CoinEx will close on December 22, 2026, nine years to the day after it opened, the Seychelles-based, Hong Kong-founded exchange said in a notice published on September 15. The company is winding down in stages rather than collapsing, and it says customers will be able to move their assets off the platform throughout.

Related reading: CLARITY Act Fails Senate Cloture Vote 49-50, Leaving Crypto Rules to Regulators · SEC Opens the Door to Tokenized Stocks With a Five-Year Exemption.

The exchange's official announcement points to a "prolonged downturn in the cryptocurrency market," a contraction in industry trading volume and liquidity, and rising regulatory requirements across major jurisdictions. It says those forces, plus compliance costs and "operational uncertainties," have "exceeded reasonable boundaries."

CoinEx launched on December 22, 2017. The notice closes with a line that reads like a tombstone: "Nine years later, on that same date, the platform closes."

The timeline CoinEx has given users

The wind-down is pinned to specific dates. Most of the operational shutdown happens in September. The money can leave until December.

September 15

• New user registrations stop.
• Referral rebates and campaign rewards stop being distributed.
• All futures markets move to reduce-only mode, so positions can be closed but not opened.
• No new orders or subscriptions for fiat services, margin trading, loans, Earn, staking or strategic trading.

September 22

• All non-spot services end. Unfilled futures orders are canceled and any open positions are force-settled at the index price.
• Unpaid loans are liquidated, with collateral sold to repay the debt and any remainder credited back.
• Earn and staking products are redeemed centrally; principal and accrued yield go to spot accounts.
• On-chain deposits close, except for CET deposits, which stay open until September 29.

September 29

• All spot trading stops and unexecuted orders are canceled.
• From 02:00 UTC, non-USDT balances are processed. Assets with external liquidity are sold and converted to USDT at net proceeds; illiquid assets are delisted and their wallets retired.
• CET still in accounts is automatically repurchased at 0.005 USDT.
• CoinEx Smart Chain and the OneSwap decentralized exchange cease operations, and the related cross-chain bridge redemption window ends.

December 22

• Withdrawals close at 02:00 UTC and the platform ceases operations.

The exchange is telling users not to wait. Its notice warns that network congestion, shifting transaction fees and slower confirmations could complicate withdrawals near the deadline.

What happens to leftover balances

Any USDT not withdrawn by the cutoff moves into independent custody. CoinEx's terms give account holders 90 days to withdraw after an account relationship ends, and the notice sets the fee for missed assets: custody charges of 5 percent of the original balance each month, measured at the end of the withdrawal period. Claims can still be filed through [email protected] until August 22, 2028, and CoinEx says it may require identity re-verification. After that date, unclaimed assets are disposed of under applicable law.

The fee is steep on purpose. A balance left untouched loses most of its value within about two years, which is less a revenue line than a way to push users to empty their accounts. The longer a customer waits, the more the exit costs.

The CET buyback, explained

CoinEx's own token gets a separate and unusually clear exit. From September 15 to September 29, the exchange says it will keep buy orders posted for CET/USDT at 0.005 USDT, with no quantity limit, no added conditions and no trading fees on the pair. On September 29, any CET left in accounts is repurchased automatically at the same price, and the proceeds land in users' spot balances. After that, there is no further redemption channel.

Founder Haipo Yang has described 0.005 USDT as CET's original listing price. The buyback therefore sits above the market. CET was trading at about 0.00466 USDT on September 15, roughly 7 percent below the offer, according to BeInCrypto data reported by crypto.news. Other trackers put it near 0.004998. The no-cap term matters: CoinEx is committing to absorb the entire remaining float, not a fixed tranche of it. Those terms are the company's, and holders are relying on the company to honor them through the window.

Why CoinEx says it is closing

The formal notice stays corporate. Yang's own statement does not. In a post on X, he wrote that CoinEx did not become one of the industry's leading exchanges and that "the security and compliance risks of running a crypto exchange have become increasingly difficult to contain." A separate line, reported by several outlets, puts the trade-off plainly: "Carrying unlimited risk for limited revenue is no longer a rational choice."

Yang said he considered selling the exchange. He chose what he called a clean ending instead, on the argument that users had entrusted their assets to the platform and, in many cases, to him. Reuters reported the same reasoning: weak markets, shrinking volume and liquidity, and rising compliance costs had gone past what the company considered workable.

CoinEx says the decision is not a solvency event. The notice states that the exchange "maintains an asset reserve ratio of over 100%" and that all user assets are "fully backed and available to withdraw." Its proof-of-reserves system publishes wallet information and uses a Merkle tree so users can check whether their balances appeared in a reserve snapshot. Those are company disclosures, and they are the central claim on which the orderly-shutdown pitch rests.

"Carrying unlimited risk for limited revenue is no longer a rational choice." — Haipo Yang, CoinEx founder

The shutdown also ends CoinEx Smart Chain and OneSwap. It does not end everything tied to the brand. ViaBTC, the Bitcoin mining pool that operates independently, said it will keep running and will drop its withdrawal-to-CoinEx feature on September 22. CoinEx Wallet and CoinEx Vault are described as separate businesses outside the wind-down.

An orderly exit, and its hard edges

The word "orderly" is doing real work here. CoinEx has a reserve claim, a three-month withdrawal window and a published schedule. That is a different shape from the collapses crypto users remember, where withdrawals froze first and explanations came later. As Blockhead put it, CoinEx is the second major platform to exit the market in three months after BitMEX's July closure. BitMEX announced its own shutdown on July 23 after 11 years and set a final date of September 23.

Orderly does not mean painless. The September 29 conversion deadline shifts risk onto users who miss it, and the 5 percent monthly custody fee is harsh. The company is also bracing for fraud. The notice states that it is "the final announcement issued by CoinEx" and that any later "announcement," "supplementary rule" or "policy adjustment" using the brand should be treated as fraudulent. Withdrawals, it says, will be communicated only through email, internal messages and verified accounts.

CoinEx has a regulatory history that predates this exit. In 2023 it settled with the New York attorney general, agreeing to refund more than $1.1 million to 4,691 New York investors and pay over $600,000 in penalties after the state said it operated without registering as a securities and commodities broker-dealer. That same year, a hot-wallet compromise cost an estimated $70 million before the exchange restored services. In June 2026, a Wall Street Journal report tied billions of dollars in transactions to Iran-related entities. CoinEx disputed the interpretation and said it had no commercial relationship with Iranian government-linked entities. None of those episodes is named in the September notice as the trigger for the closure.

What the closure signals

CoinEx is a mid-tier venue, not a giant, and its exit lands in a bad week and a bad market. On September 15, the U.S. Senate rejected a procedural motion on the CLARITY Act by 49-50, well short of the 60 votes needed, putting comprehensive U.S. crypto market-structure legislation on ice ahead of the midterms. Bitcoin was trading in the mid-$70,000 range, and The Independent framed the CoinEx news against a Bitcoin price near a two-year low.

The consolidation story is the one to watch. CryptoSlate reported that Binance, OKX, MEXC, Bybit and Gate handle roughly 88 percent of tracked trading volume, which leaves the middle of the market fighting for a shrinking share. Compliance and security spending behaves like a fixed cost: licensing, monitoring, audits and legal exposure cost about the same whether an exchange trades $58 million a day or $5 billion, while revenue tracks volume. When volume falls, the math gets ugly fast for everyone outside the top tier.

That is also why the CET buyback is interesting. If a nine-year exchange with a clean balance sheet could not find a buyer willing to take it, the acquisition value of a second-tier franchise may be close to zero. That sets the terms for whichever mid-sized venue decides next.

For now, CoinEx's immediate task is mechanical. It has to return customer assets by December 22 and make good on a buyback it has promised without a cap. The exchange is betting that finishing cleanly protects its users and its reputation. The deadline will decide whether that bet holds.

Cover: CoinEx logo by CoinEx, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.