Every week we pick one withdrawal-related story and go deep. This week there was only one candidate: on September 14–15, CoinEx — a ViaBTC-backed exchange that launched in December 2017 and served users in more than 200 countries — published an “Important Notice on CoinEx's Orderly Cessation of Operations.” It is not a hack, not a freeze, and not a bankruptcy. It is a platform announcing its own end date and publishing a timetable for getting out.
That makes it the first story in our coverage where the withdrawal cost is not measured in USDT fees but in a deadline. CoinEx set December 22, 2026 for the last withdrawal, and attached a 5% monthly custody fee to anything left behind. Below: the full calendar, the compounding arithmetic on that fee, and why the deadline that matters for most holders may be September 29 rather than December 22. Everything here comes from CoinEx's own announcement and contemporaneous coverage.
⏱️The Wind-Down Calendar, as Published
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| Sep 14–15, 2026 | Notice published on CoinEx's site and confirmed on the exchange's official X account and by founder Haipo Yang. CoinEx states this is its final official announcement and that any later notices issued in its name should be treated as fraudulent. |
| Sep 15, 2026 | New registrations stop. Referral commissions and unsettled campaign rewards end. Futures markets move to reduce-only. No new orders or subscriptions accepted for fiat services, margin, loans, Earn, staking or strategy trading. |
| Sep 22, 2026 | All non-spot services cease. On-chain deposits close, except CET (until September 29). Open futures positions are force-settled at index price; Earn and staking products are redeemed in bulk. ViaBTC separately discontinues its “Withdrawal to CoinEx” feature. |
| Sep 29, 2026 | Spot trading ends at 02:00 UTC; unfilled orders are cancelled. Remaining non-USDT balances are processed — liquid assets sold externally and converted to USDT, illiquid assets delisted. Remaining CET is repurchased at 0.005 USDT. CoinEx Smart Chain and OneSwap stop operating. |
| Dec 22, 2026, 02:00 UTC | The withdrawal window closes and the exchange platform ceases operations. |
| Aug 22, 2028 | Final deadline for filing a custody claim on USDT that was not withdrawn by December 22, 2026. |
💸The 5% Monthly Fee Is the Whole Story
Most coverage treated the closure as the story. The closure is the schedule; the fee is the story. CoinEx says unwithdrawn USDT will be moved into independent custody charged at 5% per month on the original balance recorded at the end of the withdrawal period. Read that carefully: the fee is charged against the balance as it stood on December 22, not against what remains. It does not shrink as the balance does.
Run it out. A 5% monthly charge compounds to a ~46% loss over the first twelve months — roughly half the position, gone, before considering anything the market does — and to ~64% by the August 22, 2028 claim deadline, twenty months after the window closes. For scale: the entire fee-optimisation advice this site publishes is worth about $78 a year to a weekly withdrawer. One month of the custody fee on a $10,000 balance costs $500.
The detail that is easy to miss: after December 22, CoinEx stops being an exchange and becomes a custody arrangement with its own fee schedule. Its reserve ratio — which it says exceeds 100%, with published proof-of-reserves — speaks to whether the assets exist. It says nothing about whether holding them there is free. Both statements are true at once, which is what makes the notice so easy to misread.
Takeaway: a reserve ratio is a solvency claim; a custody fee is a pricing decision. The first reassures you about December 22. The second is the reason not to need it.
🗓️Why September 29 Matters More Than December 22
The headline deadline is December 22 — 98 days after the notice. But the notice treats assets differently depending on what they are, and only USDT keeps a clean exit all the way to the end. Everything else gets converted, sold or delisted first.
Non-USDT balances are processed from 02:00 UTC on September 29. Liquid tokens are sold in external markets and converted to USDT; illiquid tokens are delisted, and holders who want them in their original form have to withdraw them before that cutoff. CET runs on its own track: a standing buy order at 0.005 USDT — the token's original listing price — with no quantity cap, through September 29, after which any remaining CET is bought automatically at the same price and credited as USDT. Trading fees on the CET/USDT pair are waived during the repurchase window.
So there are two deadlines, and they serve different holders. USDT gets 98 days. Everything else gets 14. If you hold an altcoin with thin external liquidity — or CET you would rather keep than sell at its listing price — the September 29 processing date is your real cut-off, and it arrives before most people will have finished reading the notice.
Takeaway: read wind-down notices by asset class, not by the final date in the headline. The last date belongs to the assets the exchange can still convert on its own terms.
✅What to Do, in Order
| Step | Action |
|---|---|
| 1 | Log in and check what you actually hold — including dust balances, Earn positions, staking, and open loan or margin positions. Balances you have forgotten still appear on the timetable. |
| 2 | Withdraw non-USDT assets first. This is the only category with a September 29 cut-off and a real risk of being sold or delisted rather than returned in kind. |
| 3 | Decide on CET before September 29. The 0.005 USDT repurchase is automatic and uncapped, so holding past that date means accepting the listing price whether or not you chose it. |
| 4 | Move USDT over a cheap rail. From a centralised venue the transfer is still an exchange withdrawal — the same $1-floor logic applies to wherever you are sending it, and a TRC20 transfer with rented energy costs about $0.58 on the network side. |
| 5 | Send a test amount first. CoinEx explicitly warns that congestion, changing fees or slower confirmations can complicate last-minute transfers — which is the failure mode you avoid by not being last-minute. |
| 6 | Keep the records. Custody claims on unwithdrawn USDT can be filed until August 22, 2028, and proof of the balance you held is the thing that will be hardest to reconstruct later. |
🎓What This Says About Every Exchange You Use
CoinEx's exit is, by the standards of exchange failures, a good one. It published a timetable months ahead, claims reserves above 100% with proofs, committed to an uncapped repurchase of its own token at the original listing price, and states plainly that this is the last official communication so users know to ignore anything that follows. Founder Haipo Yang said he considered selling the business and rejected it, preferring what he called a clean ending. That is close to the best case.
And it still costs users something. A venue they chose is going away, assets that are not USDT must move within 14 days or be converted on the exchange's terms, and anyone who misses December 22 pays 5% a month for the privilege of a claim they may never file. The lesson is not that CoinEx behaved badly — it is that the best-case version of an exchange closing is still an expensive, deadline-driven event for the people holding balances on it.
Which reframes what an exchange balance is. Your withdrawal access is the asset; the balance is only valuable if you can move it. That is the argument for keeping balances sized to what you would not mind converting on someone else's schedule, for knowing which rail you would use to get out, and for not letting the convenience of leaving funds parked substitute for the ability to retrieve them. An orderly wind-down with 98 days' notice is the friendly version of this story — a freeze or a breach gives you hours.
Takeaway: this was the best-managed closure we could reasonably ask for, and the arithmetic still punishes anyone who treats it as background noise.
CoinEx gave its users 98 days and a published calendar, which is more than most venues manage. The number to remember is not the fee table — it is 5% a month on whatever you leave behind, compounding to roughly half the balance in a year. The rails we track were untouched by any of it: a USDT TRC20 withdrawal still costs about $1.58 all-in, and the only thing this week changed is how carefully it is worth reading the notice from wherever your funds happen to sit.