CoinEx closes on the ninth anniversary of its launch and prices the failure to collect at 5 per cent a month

What happened

CoinEx published a notice headed 'Important Notice on CoinEx's Orderly Cessation of Operations' announcing that the exchange will close. It gives the reasons as 'the prolonged downturn in the cryptocurrency market, the significant contraction in overall industry trading volume and liquidity, and the continuously rising regulatory requirements across major jurisdictions, as well as compliance costs and operational uncertainties that have exceeded reasonable boundaries'. It states that 'CoinEx maintains an asset reserve ratio of over 100%. All user assets are fully backed and available to withdraw', and that it 'is the final announcement issued by CoinEx'. The page dates itself twice and the two do not agree. Its own metadata prints 'Published on 2026-09-14 | Updated on 2026-09-14' and carries timestamps that decode to 04:07 and 15:50 UTC on 14 September, while the text says 'Starting from the date of this announcement, September 15, 2026' and the signature reads 'CoinEx Team, Sep 15, 2026'. This story takes the publisher's own timestamp. The timetable runs in four steps. From 15 September registrations stop, referral rebates stop, futures go into reduce-only mode, and no new fiat, margin, loan, Earn, staking or strategy orders are accepted. From 22 September all non-spot services cease: open futures positions still held are force-settled at the index price, unpaid loans are liquidated under existing rules, Earn and staking products are redeemed by the platform with fixed-savings yields prorated to the actual lock-up, running strategies are ended, and on-chain deposits stop except for CET. From 02:00 UTC on 29 September spot trading ends and asset disposal begins: assets with liquidity in outside markets are sold there by the platform and the net proceeds credited to users in USDT, in batches and without further announcements, while assets with no outside liquidity are delisted and the platform 'will no longer assume responsibility for the custody or redemption of such assets'. Any CET left in an account is repurchased automatically at 0.005 USDT, the price at which the platform had been standing in the CET/USDT book with no quantity limit and no fees from 15 September, and the CoinEx Smart Chain and OneSwap stop, closing the cross-chain bridge redemption window with them. Withdrawals run until 02:00 UTC on 22 December 2026. After that, the notice says, 'any USDT assets that have not been withdrawn will be transferred by the platform into independent custody', citing clause 5.3 of its terms of service, under which a user must withdraw within 90 days of the account relationship ending, and 'The custody fee will be charged monthly at 5% of the original asset balance as of the end of the withdrawal period'. Claims go through support@coinex.com under procedures to be announced, may require identity re-verification, and close on 22 August 2028, after which unclaimed assets 'will be disposed of in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and relevant procedures'. CoinEx Wallet and CoinEx Vault are outside the cessation and continue. The closing date is chosen. 'CoinEx officially launched on December 22, 2017. Nine years later, on that same date, the platform closes.' The exchange's about page says it was established in 2017, listed more than 600 crypto assets, and ran the wallet, the vault, the smart chain, OneSwap and CET alongside the exchange. The founder's own explanation, which The Block quotes as 'The security and compliance risks of running a crypto exchange have become increasingly difficult to contain', was posted on x.com and is not cited here as a primary; it names a reason the notice does not.

Why it matters

A 5 per cent monthly fee on a base fixed at the close of the withdrawal period is not a custody charge, it is a decay schedule. Because the percentage applies to the original balance rather than to the running one, the arithmetic is linear: twenty months exhausts the account, and the claim window, from 22 December 2026 to 22 August 2028, is exactly twenty months. Whether that is designed or coincidental, the effect is that an asset nobody collects is consumed by the process for holding it, and the deadline is set where the fee has finished the job. That is the sharpest price anyone in this industry has put on the cost of an unclaimed balance, and it is published rather than buried. The disposal rule matters more than the fee for most users, because it converts everybody's portfolio into one asset without asking. From 29 September the platform sells whatever has an outside market and credits USDT, so a holder who does nothing ends up long a dollar stablecoin at whatever the platform realised, in batches it will not announce. A holder who wants their own coins has to act inside a fourteen-day window from the notice. And for assets with no outside market, the notice says plainly that after that date the platform is not responsible for custody or redemption, which is the sentence to read twice: the tail of a 600-asset listing is where a small venue's long-tail listings go to be written off, and the people holding them get fourteen days' notice and no buyer. CET is the cleanest thing in the document and the most revealing. The platform commits to buy every unit at 0.005 USDT, with no quantity limit, no conditions and no trading fee, and then buys the remainder automatically. An exchange token is a claim on the exchange's fee revenue and discounts, and when the exchange stops there is nothing for it to be a claim on, so setting a flat bid and standing in the book is the orderly answer. It also puts a number on the thing exchange tokens usually leave undefined, which is what the issuer thinks the token is worth when the issuer knows there is no future in it. Set beside the Balancer proposal filed the same day, the two wind-downs answer the same question in opposite directions. Balancer proposes to measure a treasury, audit it, and hand it out in kind to holders who present themselves, with a rule that non-participation forfeits everything. CoinEx keeps custody, converts the assets to its own choice of unit, and charges the holder for the delay. One is a liquidation run for the benefit of claimants; the other is a liquidation run for the convenience of the operator. Both are orderly, and the word is doing different work in each.

What is not settled

What CoinEx is and where it is incorporated is not stated anywhere it publishes. The notice gives no seat, the about page gives none, and FX News Group calls it a 'Chinese crypto exchange' without citing anything; this story is filed global for that reason. That matters for the custody arrangement, because 'independent custody' is not named, its terms are not published, and which law governs an unclaimed balance and its eventual disposal 'in accordance with applicable laws' cannot be worked out from the document. The reserve claim is asserted and not demonstrated here. The notice says the reserve ratio is over 100 per cent, that all user assets are fully backed, and points to a proof of reserves link; no reserve attestation was read for this story, and the claim that matters to a user over the next three months is not the ratio today but whether withdrawals keep clearing while everybody tries at once, which the notice itself anticipates in warning against concentrated attempts near the deadline. The claim procedure does not exist yet. Users are told to claim through an email address under 'the claim procedures to be announced by the platform subsequently', while the same notice says it is the final announcement CoinEx will issue and that any later announcement in its name is fraudulent. Those two sentences are hard to hold together, and a user trying to recover a balance in 2027 will have to decide which one to act on. The founder's account and the company's account differ. The notice blames the market, volume and liquidity, and regulatory and compliance costs, and never mentions security. The remarks reported from x.com name security and compliance risk as the hard truth. Whether that is a difference of framing or of substance is not something the published record settles, and there is no statement at any address CoinEx controls that says what the founder said.