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Morning Edition · Wednesday, September 23, 2026Published at 6:54 AM EDT · New York
BitMEX Halts Trading After 11 Years as Bitcoin Holds Near $86,000
The exchange that popularised perpetual futures closed at 04:00 UTC on Wednesday and left withdrawals open, while wallets tied to the FTX estate moved $75 million of ether to a market maker.
BitMEX stopped trading and deposits on Wednesday, ending an eleven-year run, and told users they can still log in and withdraw funds while the wind-down proceeds, CoinDesk reported. The exchange, co-founded by Arthur Hayes in 2014, built the perpetual futures contract that became the standard instrument of crypto leverage. Its owner, HDR Global Trading, had sought a buyer since February 2025 before deciding to close, and charges holders who leave assets behind the greater of 50 dollars or 1 percent a year.
Separately, wallets linked to FTX and Alameda Research sent about 75 million dollars of ether to an address belonging to the market maker Wintermute, according to the onchain analytics firms PeckShield and EmberCN. Neither a sale nor the purpose of the transfer has been confirmed.
Prices set the context. Bitcoin traded near 86,000 dollars on Wednesday, well below the levels of earlier this year, while gold held above 4,350 dollars an ounce and silver traded near 67 dollars after outperforming gold over the past week. The monetary metals have absorbed the demand that the digital-gold argument predicted would flow to bitcoin during a period of above-target inflation and armed conflict.
BitMEX and FTX, two of the failures that defined the 2014 to 2022 crypto cycle, are both winding down in the same week. The infrastructure that survived is more regulated, more institutional and less levered, which is the ordinary result of a credit cycle turning rather than a verdict on the asset.
Part of a tracked trend
Bitcoin Trades as a Risk Asset, Not Digital Gold
At each geopolitical or inflationary stress point, bitcoin keeps trading with liquidity-sensitive risk assets rather than with monetary metals, so the digital-gold framing continues to fail exactly when investors most want it to hold.
What this means
Bitcoin near 86,000 dollars while gold sits above 4,350 and silver near 67 shows where investors have placed their inflation and conflict hedges this year, and the answer is the metals. The channel is liquidity: bitcoin's marginal buyer is a leveraged or allocation-driven fund whose positioning tightens when policy rates rise, while central-bank and retail metal demand does not carry the same funding cost. BitMEX's closure removes one of the last venues built for high-leverage retail speculation, which reduces the amount of forced selling available in a drawdown but also reduces the liquidity that limits how sharp a price drop becomes.
What to watch
- Whether the ether sent to Wintermute is sold onto the market, since FTX estate distributions remain a recurring source of supply.
- The gap between bitcoin and gold performance through the next inflation reading, which shows whether the digital-gold framing recovers any credibility.
- Where BitMEX's former perpetual-futures volume reappears, because concentration of leverage on fewer venues changes how quickly a liquidation cascade spreads.
Observations to monitor, not financial advice.
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Comments
1Sep 23, 10:54 AM · edited
If perpetual futures open interest migrates from BitMEX to competing venues, derivatives platforms should report a measurable increase in outstanding positions within days of closure.