CoinEx is shutting down after nearly nine years, marking the collapse of a once-global cryptocurrency exchange whose business had already been squeezed by falling trading activity, rising compliance costs and scrutiny over billions of dollars in transactions linked to sanctioned Iranian entities.
The exchange stopped accepting new users Tuesday and will wind down most trading services by September 29. Customers will be allowed to withdraw assets until December 22, when CoinEx plans to close the platform completely.
CoinEx said the decision followed a prolonged crypto downturn, shrinking trading volume and liquidity, and regulatory and compliance costs that had become increasingly difficult to justify. Founder Haipo Yang said he had considered selling the business before deciding instead to close it.
The company says customer assets remain fully backed and that its reserve ratio exceeds 100%. Its most recent publicly available reserve disclosures showed coverage above 100% for major assets including Bitcoin, Ether and stablecoins.
This is therefore not being presented by CoinEx as an insolvency similar to FTX or another exchange failure where customers discovered assets were missing.
The larger financial story is what made operating CoinEx increasingly difficult in the first place.
Earlier this year, blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs traced more than $3.84 billion of transactions between CoinEx and sanctioned Iranian entities since 2019, including $2.7 billion involving Nobitex, Iran’s largest crypto exchange.
CoinEx became one of Iran’s most important connections to international digital-asset liquidity at the same time Washington was intensifying efforts to prevent cryptocurrency from replacing banking channels closed by sanctions.
Iran Exposure Became a Major Compliance Risk
CoinEx was not itself designated by the U.S. Treasury Department when Washington sanctioned Nobitex and three other Iranian crypto exchanges in June.
That distinction is important.
TRM’s blockchain analysis identifies transactions involving wallets associated with sanctioned or high-risk entities, but those transaction records do not by themselves prove CoinEx knowingly participated in sanctions evasion or illicit financing.
CoinEx disputed suggestions that it had formal business relationships with the Iranian government or Iranian exchanges. After the findings became public, the company said it had strengthened know-your-customer controls, expanded sanctions screening, blocked access from Iran and restricted or frozen accounts associated with identified sanctioned entities.
The scale of the historic activity was nevertheless unusual.
TRM found that CoinEx had become Nobitex’s largest identifiable external counterparty by 2024, almost nine times larger than the next-largest named exchange. Approximately $360 million more had moved from Nobitex into CoinEx than traveled in the opposite direction, consistent with Iranian crypto being moved offshore in search of international markets and liquidity.
TRM also estimated that nearly 8% of activity associated with CoinEx involved illicit transactions, far above the roughly 0.3% level the firm said was typical among compliant exchanges.
The blockchain firm traced about $6 million of direct exposure to wallets associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as smaller flows involving other U.S.-sanctioned organizations.
Another approximately $67 million processed through CoinEx from wallets associated with Iran’s central bank had on-chain connections to funds originating from the 2025 Bybit hack. The FBI attributed that $1.5 billion theft to North Korean state-sponsored hackers.
That does not mean CoinEx received the entire $1.5 billion stolen from Bybit. The documented connection involves a much smaller portion of the laundering trail, an important distinction from the headline size of the original hack.
CoinEx responded in June by saying it had no tolerance for illicit activity and was increasing investment in anti-money-laundering systems, transaction monitoring and sanctions compliance.
Those investments came at exactly the wrong time for the economics of a mid-sized centralized exchange.
Trading Activity Has Collapsed
Crypto exchanges largely make money when customers trade.
That business becomes considerably more difficult when volumes fall because exchanges must continue funding cybersecurity, custody infrastructure, compliance teams and regulatory licensing even as transaction revenue declines.
Bitcoin spot trading activity has fallen sharply during the current crypto downturn. Average daily volume dropped to around $1.8 billion in August, near a three-year low, according to market data cited by Reuters.
Bitcoin itself remains far below its October 2025 peak, reducing speculative trading activity across smaller tokens as well.
CoinEx was still processing about $52 million of spot volume over a recent 24-hour period, according to CoinMarketCap, but that placed it far below the industry’s largest exchanges. The platform had previously claimed more than 10 million users across more than 200 countries and regions.
The combination creates a difficult equation: regulatory expectations increasingly resemble those imposed on major financial institutions, while revenue for smaller exchanges depends on a crypto market where customers are trading much less.
CoinEx had experienced that regulatory pressure before the Iran scrutiny.
In 2023, the company agreed to leave the U.S. after settling a case brought by the New York attorney general, which accused it of operating without required registration. CoinEx agreed to refund more than $1.1 million to New York customers and pay more than $600,000 in penalties.
Its international compliance burden only increased from there.
Withdrawals Are Now the Most Important Test
CoinEx plans to shut services down in stages rather than close the platform immediately.
New registrations have ended, futures positions are being restricted, and lending, staking, margin and other products are being phased out. Most exchange services are expected to stop September 29.
Customers who still hold assets after that point may have some balances converted into USDT as the platform prepares for final closure.
Withdrawals remain available until December 22.
After that deadline, remaining USDT balances are expected to move into independent custody. CoinEx says those accounts will face a monthly custody charge equal to 5% of the original balance, with customers having until August 2028 to claim their assets.
That timeline makes customer withdrawals the immediate measure of whether CoinEx’s orderly shutdown works as advertised.
The exchange said its reserves are sufficient to return all customer assets. In May, its published proof-of-reserves showed reserve ratios of 106.6% for USDT, 106.1% for Bitcoin and just above 100% for Ether. A subsequent June disclosure placed assets in CoinEx-controlled wallets at roughly $528 million.
Proof-of-reserves can demonstrate control over specified assets, but it is not equivalent to a complete audited balance sheet showing every liability. The real confirmation will come from whether withdrawals continue normally through the wind-down.
The Shutdown Is Bigger Than CoinEx
CoinEx’s exit arrives as Washington has made cryptocurrency an increasingly important part of its campaign against Iran’s financial networks.
Treasury sanctioned Nobitex, Bitpin, Ramzinex and Wallex in June, saying Iranian exchanges were being used for sanctions evasion and financing connected to the IRGC. Nobitex alone handled more than half of Iran’s identified crypto inflows in 2025.
Treasury has since expanded actions against banks, currency networks and digital-asset infrastructure connected to Iran.
For centralized exchanges outside the United States, the message is financially significant even when they are not directly sanctioned: handling customers across hundreds of jurisdictions increasingly requires the ability to identify not only individuals on sanctions lists but also wallets, intermediaries and transaction paths connected to them.
That raises the fixed cost of remaining in the exchange business.
CoinEx’s closure does not prove that regulatory scrutiny over Iran forced the company out. Management specifically cited the combination of weak crypto markets, declining liquidity and rising compliance requirements, and no regulator has publicly announced an enforcement action requiring the shutdown.
But its history shows why those compliance costs have become harder to treat as optional.
CoinEx spent years providing international liquidity to a crypto ecosystem that U.S. authorities increasingly view as part of Iran’s sanctions-evasion infrastructure. When that activity was exposed, maintaining access to major markets required stronger monitoring at the same time trading revenue was deteriorating.
The immediate risk now sits with customers still holding money on the exchange.
If CoinEx completes withdrawals without losses, its nine-year run will end as a voluntary retreat from an increasingly expensive business. If withdrawal problems emerge before December 22, the shutdown would become something considerably more serious.
For the broader crypto industry, the next question is which smaller centralized exchanges can still generate enough trading revenue to pay for the compliance infrastructure regulators now expect.