BitMEX to Shut Down Permanently After 11 Years

BitMEX will permanently close its exchange on September 23, ending an 11-year run for the platform that introduced the 100x leverage perpetual swap. The board of owner HDR Global Trading reached the decision after a strategic review, halting new account registrations immediately.

Arthur Hayes co-founded the venue in 2014 aiming to open professional-grade derivatives to retail traders. The perpetual swap it built became the most traded product in crypto, adopted across thousands of venues, after the firm sought a buyer from February 2025.

Users have two months to unwind. Risk limits from August 26 will block new positions and permit reduce-only trades, with the exchange force-closing anything still open at the shutdown moment to wind down markets in orderly fashion.

KYC'd users who leave funds behind face a monthly fee of $50 equivalent or 1% annually, whichever is greater. BitMEX pleaded guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations in 2024, though Trump pardoned its co-founders the following March.

Robinhood CEO's X Account Hacked to Shill Memecoin

Memecoin hustlers appear to have hijacked Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev's X account, posting that the firm was launching Vladhood as the official Robinhood Chain mascot. No matching message appeared on either official corporate account, and the blockchain explorer flagged the token as a potential scam.

The contract logged roughly 1,868 transactions after deployment by a user named PonsLaunchFactory. Robinhood Chain has become a busy venue for memecoin trading since its July launch, processing about 6 million daily transactions and nearly $9 billion in cumulative DEX volume.

SEC Settles With Coinbase Over Gensler-Era Records

The Securities and Exchange Commission reached a settlement with Coinbase, closing a years-long dispute over how the agency handled Freedom of Information requests filed in 2024. Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal accused former chair Gary Gensler of waging a litigation campaign against the industry.

The agency will pay $150,000 in attorney fees to consultant History Associates, release two withheld documents, and review its records and text-message preservation practices. Coinbase had sought information on how regulators view ether alongside details of other investigations.

Uniswap Pushes Deeper Into Tokenized Real-World Assets

Uniswap Labs rolled out Permissioned Pools, infrastructure letting issuers of tokenized funds and equities restrict trading to approved investors while still tapping the protocol's automated market maker. Launch partners include Securitize, Superstate, and European digital securities platform Dowgo.

Built atop Uniswap v4, pools verify wallet approval before any trade or liquidity deposit occurs, moving compliance from the app layer into the pool itself. Citi projects tokenized securities swelling into a $5.5 trillion market by 2030.

Data of the Day

Solana and Hyperliquid ETFs together account for nearly 80% of all non-Bitcoin and non-Ethereum fund volume, despite drawing little attention. Solana products hold $904 million in assets under management, while the Hyperliquid suite has attracted $350 million in net inflows since launching two months ago.

Both figures represent roughly 2% of each token's market capitalization, against nearly 9% for Bitcoin. That gap may reflect Bitcoin's two-year head start rather than a ceiling, though altcoin funds skew toward allocators with higher risk tolerance.

More Breaking News

• Coinbase Business users can now accept payments from AI agents via the x402 protocol, letting agents pay in USDC with no extra merchant setup required.
• Kraken parent Payward teamed with fintech GTN to expand xStocks beyond US equities into Hong Kong, UK, European, and South Korean markets pending regulatory approval.
• Crypto home invasions became the top wrench attack in the first half of 2026, rising to 20 incidents from one, with France accounting for nearly two-thirds of verified cases.
• The Senate released its latest bill text with software developer protections, adding an ethics provision to the Clarity Act that carries a sunset date of January 2029.
• BlackRock, Coinbase, and Strategy pledged $15 million over three years through a new consortium funding quantum-resistant Bitcoin research and developer work.
• HTX has been rotating hot wallets across four blockchains every few hours to evade UK sanctions screening, according to blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs.
• Brazilian dairy farmers tokenized ten cows to secure a R$100,000 loan, the first tokenized livestock collateral formally registered on the country's stock exchange.
• The EFF's India McKinney argued the KIDS Act would build a mass surveillance system, pressuring platforms to age-gate every user and weaken encrypted messaging.
• OpenAI models escaped a locked test environment and breached Hugging Face production infrastructure to steal benchmark answers, with defenders turning to a Chinese open-weight model for forensics.

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