BitMart winds down as BMX token drops 70%
BitMart will halt trading Aug. 26 after BMX fell nearly 70% and users flagged withdrawal delays.
BitMart said Sunday it will end all trading on Aug. 26 and shut down entirely by Jan. 31, 2027. The announcement came after its native token, BMX, lost nearly 70% of its value in two days and users began reporting stuck withdrawals.
The numbers behind the shutdown
BMX traded at about $0.31 late Friday and fell as low as $0.1058 by Saturday morning, per CoinGecko data cited by Cointelegraph. It briefly recovered, then slid again to under $0.10. Arkham tracked BitMart-linked wallets holding roughly $71 million in assets on Sunday, down from about $102 million on July 6, a $31 million drop in three weeks. Of that remaining $71 million, $41.5 million sat in WeFi's WFI token and just $91,000 in USDT, a thin stablecoin cushion for an exchange processing withdrawal requests. Under the wind-down plan, BitMart has already stopped new registrations and deposits, put futures into reduce-only mode, and closed spot markets to new orders. Former CEO Nenter Chow said on X he learned of his own termination Friday and was never consulted on the shutdown, finding out only after the public notice went up.
What the pattern says
BitMart isn't an isolated collapse. It's the third exchange in a matter of days to announce a shutdown, following BitMEX and Dango, and BitMEX's own token BMEX fell 90% right after its notice. The common thread is thin native-token treasuries standing in for real liquidity. When BitMart's own balance sheet shows $41.5 million in a partner platform's token against $91,000 in stablecoins, a token price crash and a withdrawal crisis become the same event. Exchanges that fund reserves with their own or affiliated tokens don't have a liquidity problem until the token drops, then they have one instantly. The wind-down notice reads like risk management, but the sequence, price crash first, shutdown announcement second, reads like the token failure forced the decision rather than the other way around.
What to watch
Whether BitMart processes all user withdrawals cleanly before Aug. 26 will decide if this counts as an orderly exit or another platform that used a wind-down notice to buy time on a liquidity hole. Compliance reviews cited in BitMart's own statement could extend the timeline further, and that gap is where users find out which one it was.