Sacrificing three exchanges in a month, can the Crypto bull market still come?
The midwaist exchange business seems to have come to an end. On July 1, AscendEX ceased operations. On July 23, BitMEX, which once defined a cryptographic perpetual contract and brought 100x leverage to the mainstream market, announced that it would close after two months. Three days later, BitMart, which has been in operation for nearly nine years, initiated a shutdown procedure: it stopped accepting new users and deposits, ended spot and contract trading on August 26, and officially terminated platform operations on January 31, 2027. In less than a month, three centralized exchanges (CEXs) that have gone through at least one round of bull and bear cycles have left the market one after another. In a market that is used to treating bad news as an inverse indicator, this can easily raise the question: exchanges can't survive. Has the crypto market bottomed out? This is not another FTX moment where AscendEX was originally known as BitMax. According to official data, it was founded by a Chinese team with a background in quantitative trading on Wall Street. Founder George Cao and others are closely linked to the New York financial community. BitMart was founded by Sheldon Xia. In the early days, he participated in events organized by the Yangtze River Business School and the Chinese and US blockchain community in New York, and also set up a team in New York; however, its global business has been operated through offshore entities for a long time, and public commercial data shows that it is headquartered in the Cayman Islands. Both have clear Chinese entrepreneurial backgrounds and experience in the US market, and are typical examples of the “Wall Street team plus offshore trading platform” entrepreneurial model in the early years. This model used to work very well. Between 2017 and 2021, an exchange is not required to obtain a full license in every market or have a bank-level compliance and escrow system. As long as the coin is listed fast enough, the contract leverage is high enough, and there are enough rebates, and with the Chinese-speaking community, Telegram, and KOL subscription channels, it is possible to quickly accumulate users in a round of bull markets. By 2026, these conditions are far from enough. Judging from current public information, the three exchanges can be boiled down to three “dead” methods: AscendEX faced liquidity and compliance pressure, BitMart chose to exit in an orderly manner, and BitMEX was left behind by users and trading volume. What they all have in common is that they can no longer afford the high costs of a global crypto exchange. On the face of it, exchanges have been shut down one after another, which is easily reminiscent of the FTX-style crisis in 2022. However, the transmission mechanism is not the same this time. The bear market in 2018 was the disappearance of demand. The ICO bubble burst, a large number of tokens lost liquidity, retail investors withdrew, and listing fees, transaction fees, and Taiwan dollar valuations fell together. According to CoinGecko's statistical method — which defines Bitcoin running below the 200-day EMA for 30 consecutive days as a bear market — the bear market from 2018 to 2019 continued for 385 days, with Bitcoin's biggest retracement of 83.6%. The problem in 2022 is that the credit chain is broken. After Terra's collapse, the complex borrowing and asset liability relationships between Three Arrows Capital, Celsius, Voyager, Genesis, and FTX turned the failure of a single project into a credit contagion for the entire industry. According to Bank for International Settlements statistics, after the Terra incident, the market value of crypto assets of more than 450 billion US dollars evaporated; after FTX went bankrupt, the market lost about 200 billion US dollars. In the 2026 shutdown wave, there was no serial rush of the same scale. It's more like a slow but complete structural elimination: total market volume falls, regulatory thresholds are raised, liquidity is concentrated at the head, and on-chain transactions take users from the other side. Regulation has gone from a potential risk to a cost of doing business. EU MiCA will be fully applicable from December 30, 2024. According to ESMA's explanation, the original crypto service provider can continue to operate for a period of time according to member state regulations, but the transition period must not exceed July 1, 2026 at the latest. Platforms that are not authorized by MiCA cannot continue to rely on the original system to carry out related business after the transition period is over. AscendEX ceased operations on July 1st. It also acknowledged in the announcement that the platform was not authorized by MiCA. But compliance is only one reason: AscendEX also mentioned failed financing transactions, market pressure, and financial condition assessments. Regulation didn't kill this exchange alone. It just makes an already weak balance sheet more difficult to maintain. The old exchange model is dead. The “incremental sharing dividend” ended the second quarter of 2026, and the total market value of the crypto market fell 12.6%, from $2.4 trillion to $2.1 trillion, about 52% lower than the October 2025 high. More importantly, “cash” in the industry is also dwindling. The total stablecoin market capitalization fell 1.6% quarterly to 3...
