Bitcoin Magazine

Crypto Derivatives Exchange BitMEX To Shut Down in September

Crypto exchange BitMEX will close down in September, according to a Thursday announcement on the company’s website. 

The exchange said that after “a strategic review of the business and the broader crypto industry, the board of HDR Global Trading Limited, owner and operator of BitMEX, has decided to close the exchange.” 

BitMEX did not give further information on why the exchange was closing but told users to withdraw their funds “as soon as practical.” 

“The BitMEX platform has always remained grounded to the true ethos of Bitcoin — neutrality, transparency, and decentralisation, which is evident through our peer-to-peer operations and a top priority focus on user fund safety,” the statement read. 

“While this news is a difficult one to share, we are proud of everything that has been built at the company since its launch as a pioneer of crypto derivatives.”

BitMEX added that users will be able to access services as normal until September 23. After that date, the exchange will only hold client assets until they are withdrawn. 

It continued that it had unstaked all staked BMEX Tokens on the platform, and they are now available in users’ accounts.

Run-ins with the law

Run by eccentric crypto entrepreneur Arthur Hayes, BitMEX has had its fair share of run-ins with the law. 

Regulators first stated that BitMEX had allowed U.S. clients to use its exchange without verifying their identities.

The company in 2021 paid $100 million in civil penalties after the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network alleged that the exchange’s senior leadership “altered U.S. customer information to hide the customer’s true location.”

BitMEX founders Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed pled guilty in 2022 to violations of the Bank Secrecy Act for failing to operate an anti-money laundering program at the cryptocurrency exchange. Each founder then agreed to pay a $10 million fine to settle the charges. 

Then, last year, BitMEX was hit with a further $100 million fine for its guilty plea for breach of the United States Bank Secrecy Act. 

But following the election of crypto-friendly President Donald Trump, all three founders were pardoned in 2025.

This post Crypto Derivatives Exchange BitMEX To Shut Down in September first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Kraken Seeks Final Judgment After $22 Million Award Against Former Auditor

Payward, the parent company of the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, has asked the Delaware Court of Chancery to enter a final judgment against its former auditor, Mazars USA, after an arbitrator awarded the firm $22 million. 

The exchange disclosed the request on July 7 through an open letter from co-CEO Arjun Sethi and a series of posts from co-CEO Dave Ripley.

The dispute traces to December 2023, when Mazars withdrew from Kraken’s 2022 audit days before its completion. Mazars had audited Kraken for three prior years and issued two clean opinions, according to the company. 

In writing, Sethi said, the auditor confirmed it had no disagreement with management, no concerns about the firm’s integrity, and no findings of fraud.

Mazars attributed its resignation to legal developments, among them a complaint the Securities and Exchange Commission had filed against Kraken weeks before.

That SEC complaint was dismissed with prejudice, with no penalties and no admission of wrongdoing. Kraken said the abandoned audit cost it years and millions of dollars in legal fees to secure new auditors and reassure banks, regulators, and counterparties. The exchange said it has received a clean audit in each year that followed.

The letters come as Kraken pursues a full European banking license, reportedly through Lithuania, a move that would allow the company to offer traditional banking services across the European Economic Area and potentially become the first cryptocurrency exchange to secure a full European bank license, according to CoinDesk reporting. 

The effort is part of Kraken’s broader regulatory strategy as it expands beyond crypto into mainstream financial services, building on milestones including U.S. Federal Reserve payment access and authorization in the UAE.

Operation Chokepoint 2.0

Sethi placed the episode within what critics call Operation Chokepoint 2.0, a term for what they describe as a coordinated effort by regulators to cut lawful crypto firms off from banking and other services. In December 2022, a year before quitting the Kraken audit, Mazars Group halted proof-of-reserves work for the crypto sector and removed those reports from its website.

The letter cited a chain of actions from 2022 and 2023. On January 3, 2023, the Federal Reserve, FDIC, and OCC issued a joint statement warning that crypto business models raised safety and soundness concerns for banks. 

Documents released after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit showed the FDIC sent at least 25 letters to two dozen banks urging them to pause or refrain from expanding crypto activity. The SEC’s SAB 121 accounting guidance required public companies holding crypto to record those assets on their balance sheets, a step that made custody uneconomical for banks. 

The Federal Reserve denied a master account to Custodia, a Wyoming bank built for digital assets. And in March 2023, the payment networks run by Silvergate and Signature shut down within days of each other.

As the debanking era ends, Kraken demands rules 

Much of that framework has come undone. The SEC rescinded SAB 121, the banking regulators withdrew the joint statement, and a House committee report concluded that regulators used vague rules and informal pressure to push banks away from lawful digital asset firms. 

Sethi also recounted the experience of Kraken founder Jesse Powell, who started the exchange in 2011. In March 2023, federal agents raided Powell’s home and seized his devices in connection with a dispute involving a nonprofit unrelated to Kraken. 

After two years, the government closed the investigation, returned the devices, and brought no charges. Powell handed the chief executive role to Ripley, and Sethi joined Ripley in leading the company.

The letter closed with a call for Congress to pass the CLARITY Act, which would establish market-structure rules for digital assets, dividing oversight between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the SEC and adding protections for software developers. 

The House passed the bill in July 2025 by a vote of 294 to 134, with 78 Democrats in support, and the Senate Banking Committee advanced its version in May. 

Sethi contrasted the U.S. timeline with the European Union, where the MiCA framework took effect across member states.

This post Kraken Seeks Final Judgment After $22 Million Award Against Former Auditor first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Exchange Inflows Spike to 49,000 BTC in a Day, Signaling More Volatility is Coming: Report

CryptoQuant’s weekly report, “Incoming Volatility?”, makes a clean, data-backed case that something is about to break.

Bitcoin exchange inflows spiked to roughly 49,000 BTC on June 30 — an extreme reading seen only four other times in 2026. Ethereum inflows blew past 1.25 million ETH the same week. Altcoin deposit transactions hit nearly 45,000 a day, the highest in two months and the exact pattern that front-ran Bitcoin’s slide from $82K in early May to below $58K in late June. 

Every one of those signals has historically preceded a directional move, usually down.

And yet, as of Thursday morning, Bitcoin is trading around $61,600 — back above the $60K support the report frames as the line in the sand, and up several thousand dollars from Wednesday’s print near $58,600. The chain is screaming risk-off but the price just shrugged it off. 

The most bearish detail in the report isn’t the raw inflow volume — it’s the composition. The average deposit size doubled from 1 BTC to 2 BTC. That’s not retail panic-selling in dribs and drabs; that’s whales and institutions deliberately repositioning coins onto exchanges. 

As CryptoQuant’s Julio Moreno notes, a jump in average deposit size is a more bearish tell than high volume alone, because it signals intent rather than noise. When large holders queue up to sell, they usually know something, or think they do.

So why did price go the other way? Because the flows aren’t happening in a vacuum. Bitcoin’s June bleed had less to do with anything crypto-native than with capital rotating out of digital assets and into the semiconductor trade, U.S.-Iran tensions stoking inflation fears, and Strategy trimming its stack. 

Mt. Gox moving 10,422 BTC last month revived creditor-selling anxiety ahead of the October repayment deadline. Spot Bitcoin ETFs, meanwhile, have bled billions across a double-digit streak of outflow sessions. 

The whales moving coins to exchanges may simply be positioning for that same macro storm and not really causing it. 

Thursday’s bounce came courtesy of dovish Fed commentary that eased rate-cut fears. That’s the tell within the tell: in this market, macro is the dog and on-chain flows are the tail. 

Bitcoin price action

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at $61,469.98, up $1,322.54 (+2.2%) on the day after bouncing off a 24-hour low of $59,520 and peaking near $62,148 around 10 a.m. 

The recovery back above $60,000 — with $32.49B in daily volume and a $1.23T market cap — lines up with the report’s read that $60K is the battleground level, and today the bulls are holding it.

This post Bitcoin Exchange Inflows Spike to 49,000 BTC in a Day, Signaling More Volatility is Coming: Report first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Anchorage Digital and Binance Launch Off-Exchange Settlement for Institutional Crypto Trading

Anchorage Digital has announced an integration with Binance to bring off-exchange settlement to institutional crypto traders, giving clients access to the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume without surrendering custody of their assets.

The partnership, powered by Atlas — Anchorage Digital’s suite of settlement infrastructure — marks the first off-exchange settlement implementation within that platform. Under the arrangement, institutions can trade on Binance while their assets remain in segregated custody at Anchorage Digital Bank, the first federally chartered crypto bank in the United States.

The structure mirrors how institutional trading works in traditional financial markets, where custody and execution are kept separate. In those markets, assets are held with a custodian and transferred only at final settlement — never sitting on the balance sheet of the trading venue. Crypto has long lacked that separation, requiring institutions to pre-fund exchange accounts and accept counterparty exposure to the venue itself.

“Institutions need crypto market structure that reflects the standards they already rely on in traditional finance,” said Nathan McCauley, co-founder and CEO of Anchorage Digital in a note to Bitcoin Magazine. “Off-Exchange Settlement, powered by Atlas, is designed to separate custody from execution, helping institutions access exchange liquidity while keeping assets in secure custody.”

The arrangement also allows institutions to pledge both crypto assets and USD accounts as collateral, enabling capital deployment while satisfying trading margin requirements — an approach consistent with workflows at traditional financial firms.

Binance has been building out its institutional infrastructure over the past several years, expanding triparty banking and collateral management offerings for professional clients. The Anchorage Digital integration extends that effort.

“Working with Anchorage Digital gives institutional clients another way to access Binance liquidity while managing custody and collateral through a model that is more familiar to traditional financial markets,” said Catherine Chen, Head of VIP & Institutional at Binance.

Crypto adoption and off-exchange settlement

Atlas is designed to support a range of institutional workflows beyond off-exchange settlement, including trading, lending, collateral management, and other capital markets functions. 

Anchorage Digital says the platform is built for the current phase of institutional crypto adoption, where firms entering the market have compliance, custody, and operational requirements that earlier crypto infrastructure was not designed to meet.

Anchorage Digital is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, KKR, GIC, and Visa, and carries a valuation of $4.2 billion. 

In addition to Anchorage Digital Bank N.A., the company operates through Anchorage Digital Singapore, licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and Anchorage Digital NY, which holds a BitLicense from the New York Department of Financial Services.

This post Anchorage Digital and Binance Launch Off-Exchange Settlement for Institutional Crypto Trading first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.