😠BitMEX Exchange To Shut Down
A short history on its rise and fall
On today’s menu:
😠BitMEX shuts after 11 years
😮 Telegram is giving all users a wallet
💎 Robinhood launches its Platinum Card
The End of an Era: BitMEX Shuts Down After 11 Years
BitMEX launched in 2014 with a simple mission: professional-grade crypto derivatives for everyone.
It delivered.
The platform invented the 100x leverage perpetual swap — now the most traded financial product in the entire crypto industry, adopted by thousands of exchanges globally.
At its peak, BitMEX was processing billions in daily volume and minting a new generation of crypto traders.
Then came the fall. In October 2020, the DOJ and CFTC charged founders Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo, and Samuel Reed for operating an unregistered platform and deliberately avoiding anti-money laundering controls — all three eventually pleaded guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations.
Trump pardoned them in 2025.
But the reputational damage was done, and serious traders had already left for cleaner alternatives.
BitMEX will officially shut down September 23, 2026 — halting new registrations immediately, blocking new positions from August 26, and force-closing anything left open before the final deadline.
The one clean legacy: eleven years of operation with zero customer funds lost to hacks.
Once again, this shows that the first-mover doesn’t always win.
A Billion People Are About to Get a Crypto Wallet Whether They Know It Or Not
Pavel Durov announced that Telegram will embed a native non-custodial Gram wallet directly into every version of the app this summer — instant, zero-fee transactions for over one billion users, in what he called the largest non-custodial wallet rollout in history.
The key word is non-custodial: Telegram never holds your private keys. You do.
If Telegram goes down or gets into another regulatory fight, your funds stay yours.
This sits alongside the existing custodial @wallet run by The Open Platform — which has 150 million users and offers trading, yield, and tokenized assets — but Durov’s native wallet goes deeper, baked into the core app rather than a bolt-on feature.
This puts Telegram in direct competition with X Money, which launched fiat-only in June 2026 with zero crypto integration.
This is good for abstracting blockchain tech away from users, and TON and Telegram are on the forefront of actually integrating it in a meaningful way.
Robinhood Just Decided It Wants to Be Your Whole Life
Robinhood began rolling out its invite-only Platinum Card — a $695 annual fee card with more than $3,000 in claimed annual benefits, plated in real platinum, and designed to pull customers deeper into the Robinhood ecosystem at every spending touchpoint.
The perks lean aggressively into the Robinhood flywheel:
10% back on hotels and rental cars booked through the Robinhood app
5% on dining and flights
cash-back that requires a Robinhood brokerage account to redeem
Meaning every swipe nudges you further into their platform.
The unexpected addition: a complimentary Function health membership covering 160+ lab tests annually, a nod to the bet that wealthy Robinhood users care as much about their bodies as their portfolios.
Gold subscriptions — the tier most likely to receive invites first — generated $50 million in revenue in Q1 2026 alone, up 32% year-over-year.
The Platinum Card isn’t really a credit card. It’s a retention tool with a $695 cover charge.
In other news
Tokenized Stocks Market Diversifies Beyond Crypto as Crypto-Linked Share Falls From 79% to 21% in a Year (a16zcrypto)
Galaxy Launches Bitcoin Quantum Readiness Initiative to Protect Bitcoin’s Cryptographic Foundations (Galaxy)
Anthropic Introduces Claude Opus 5 (Anthropic)
Brazil’s B3 Registers First Tokenized Livestock Deal for Brazilian Farmers (CryptoBriefing)
Phantom Plans to End Support for Monad Network (Phantom)
Degens Only
