BitMart Exchange to Cease Trading by August 26, Full Shutdown Set for 2027

BitMart's crypto exchange will shut down its trading facilities by August 26, and its operation will come to a close on January 31, 2027. According to the shutdown process that has been laid out, BitMart has ceased taking any new users or deposits, and futures trading has entered reduced-only mode and closed spot order books. As per the data by CoinGecko, the native token of BitMart, BMX, has witnessed a depreciation of more than 70 percent of its value amid reports of delays in the withdrawal of tokens by users of the platform. At the time of writing, BMX was valued at $0.09 (roughly Rs. 8.6 from $0.31 (roughly Rs. 29) recorded on Friday evening.

Withdrawal Delays and Leadership Exit Follow Wind-Down Announcement

Before the shutdown announcement, several users of X noted the increased duration of withdrawal time, with some noting that Tether USDT withdrawal requests were still pending for many hours. According to Arkham data, wallets associated with BitMart held about $71 million (roughly Rs. 682 crore) in crypto assets as of Sunday, down from around $102 million (roughly Rs. 978 crore) on July 6. About $41.5 million (roughly Rs. 398 crore) was in stablecoin banking platform WeFi's WFI tokens, while there was about $91,000 (roughly Rs. 87.2 lakh) worth of USDT.

In its wind-up notice, BitMart said some withdrawal applications might require further compliance and security checks, which might lead to processing delays. Nenter Chow, who used to be BitMart's chief executive officer, posted on X that he was told on Friday that he had been fired and was no longer managing BitMart. According to Chow, he had not been consulted on BitMart's closure and only found out about it after the company issued its wind-up notice.

In recent times, we have seen plenty of crypto exchanges winding up operations. One of them was Loopring, the first zero-knowledge rollup solution from Ethereum. The DeFi protocol shut down its decentralised exchange and AMM, halted all trading operations, and instantly stopped the relayer. The Loopring team gave three main reasons for shutting down: a failure to achieve any kind of adoption, poor business development skills, and getting technologically outdated by current zkEVM solutions.

There have been plenty of DeFi protocols that have also thrown in the towel; for example, DeFi mobile “superapp” Legend, which announced its shutdown after two years of operation. Legend was a DeFi aggregator that mainly aimed to bring DeFi to its users. The TVL for the broader DeFi ecosystem has fallen close to 50 percent since October. Another protocol was Carrot, a Solana-based decentralised finance yield protocol, which was shut down not because of any operational problems, but due to the Drift Protocol exploit in early April.