The Coinformer banner
the coinformer
Contact
Live 5m
T
The Coinformer Newsroom
News15 September, 20263 min read

CoinEx token lost 60% before users learned the exchange was closing

CoinEx spent August talking about CET's long-term future, but its token began a 60% slide before users learned the exchange would close.

CoinEx token lost 60% before users learned the exchange was closing

Discuss this article:

PERPLEXITYCHATGPTCLAUDEGEMINI
Does this story need context? Notes are selected by independent community ratings, not editors.
How it works

CoinEx's native token lost roughly 60% of its value in the two weeks before the crypto exchange told users it was shutting down.

  • CET traded around $0.012 on Sept. 1 before falling to roughly $0.005 by Sept. 13, according to CoinGecko data.
  • That's two days before CoinEx founder Haipo Yang announced that the nine-year-old exchange would cease operations.

What's odd is that the broader crypto market didn't suffer anything close to the same decline over that period.

Bitcoin was roughly flat, while Ethereum and BNB Coin gained ground, meaning CET's drop appears to have been largely specific to the CoinEx ecosystem.

There's no public evidence that anyone traded on advance knowledge of the shutdown and the price decline alone doesn't establish that information leaked.

But the timing leaves an obvious unanswered question over when CoinEx actually decided to close.

"Long-term ecosystem development"

The decline also came while CoinEx was still publicly supporting CET.

On Sept. 2, the exchange announced that it had repurchased and burned about 19.3 million CET worth roughly $228,000 as part of its longstanding token buyback program.

Only weeks earlier, CoinEx had described those repurchases as part of its commitment to CET's "long-term ecosystem development."

Now that ecosystem is being wound down.

Yang said in an X post on Tuesday, Sept. 15, that CoinEx would close permanently on Dec. 22, exactly nine years after it launched, arguing that the security and compliance risks of operating a crypto exchange had become too large relative to its revenue.

"Revenues can decline, responsibility does not. Carrying unlimited risk for limited revenue is no longer a rational choice."

Haipo Yang

CoinEx says customer assets remain "fully backed" and "available for withdrawal" until the shutdown date.

The exchange also plans to buy back CET at its original listing price of 0.005 USDT per token with no quantity cap, effectively putting the wind-down price close to where CET had already fallen before users learned CoinEx was closing.

  • CoinEx hasn't publicly explained what caused CET's sharp pre-announcement decline or when management made the final decision to shut the exchange.
Layoffs