CoinEx sets a custody fee that zeroes a balance by the deadline

The CoinEx shutdown ends nine years of trading, and founder Haipo Yang says he chose a clean ending over a sale, The Block reports. The schedule he published sets a custody fee that erases an unclaimed balance by its own final deadline.

“The security and compliance risks of running a crypto exchange have become increasingly difficult to contain.”

— Haipo Yang, Founder of CoinEx, 15 September 2026

Haipo Yang, founder of CoinEx

The schedule

The timetable:

• Registrations closed today, most services stop on 29 September, and the withdrawal window shuts on 22 December.
• Balances left after 29 September may be converted to USDT, and anything still there after 22 December moves to independent custody at a 5% monthly fee charged on the original balance.
• The final deadline for custody claims is 22 August 2028, which is 20 months after the custody starts.

Five percent a month, charged against the original balance rather than the shrinking one, runs to 100% across 20 months. The final claim deadline of 22 August 2028 is the date an unclaimed balance reaches zero, and the two numbers were set to meet.

Users have 98 days to move their money out, and 14 of those before most trading stops. Anyone holding a coin the exchange decides to convert gets USDT instead, at whatever rate applies on the day. Yang's stated priority is that users withdraw in full and that employees get a dignified farewell, and the withdrawal window is the part that decides whether the first half of that holds.

Why it closed

CoinEx turns over about 852 bitcoin a day, roughly $66 million, and ranks 64th of the hundred exchanges CoinGecko scores, with a trust rating of 7 and a founding year of 2017. That daily figure is 2.5% of what American spot bitcoin funds traded on Friday alone.

CoinEx left the American market in 2023 after settling with New York's attorney general over operating unregistered, and TRM Labs reported this year that the platform handled more than $3.8 billion of flows connected to Iranian entities since 2019, including sanctioned counterparties. Averaged over seven years that is about $543 million a year, or 58 days of the exchange's current volume. Screening flows of that kind costs more than a platform this size earns from them.

Gemini waited 23 months for a single Singapore licence and became the thirty-eighth holder, and the three largest securities regulators each define the same products differently. An exchange serving 200 countries pays that bill in every one of them, and a platform doing $66 million a day has fewer places to hide it. For its millions of users the dates in the schedule matter more than the reasons behind them.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.