BitMEX is winding down. What its own notice says happens to a balance you leave behind.

HDR Global Trading Limited announced in July that it is closing BitMEX, effective from September 2026, following what the company describes as a strategic review of the business and the wider crypto industry. New account registrations stopped with immediate effect. Eleven years, one 100x perpetual swap that the rest of the industry copied, and now a wind-down notice.

The obituaries have been written elsewhere. The part with a deadline attached is the custody term.

The leftover-balance fee

Per the announcement, users keep account access after the closure date to view balances and transaction history and to withdraw funds. The account does not vanish. But KYC-verified users who have not withdrawn their assets by the closure time will be charged a monthly account fee of USD 50 equivalent, or 1% per annum, whichever is greater — with the company reserving the right to raise it later, communicated in advance.

Read the “whichever is greater” carefully. Below roughly USD 60,000 of residual balance the flat USD 50 a month dominates, and a small forgotten balance is eaten on a schedule rather than a percentage. That is a storage charge on an account you can no longer trade in.

The trading side, as stated

Risk limits were applied from 26 August 2026 at 04:00:00 UTC, after which users can only reduce existing positions, not open new ones. Between that point and the closure time, the company says it will force-close open positions to manage an orderly wind-down, with anything still open closed automatically once closure takes effect. Contracts with limited liquidity are subject to early settlement, with notice given per the company’s standard practices. Staked BMEX has already been unstaked into holder accounts.

The company also says additional review procedures apply to withdrawal requests during the wind-down, that processing may be slowed by blockchain confirmation delays, and that no expedited or priority withdrawal service exists — a statement it makes chiefly as a phishing warning. Anyone offering you one is not from BitMEX. It points users at its Proof of Reserves and Liabilities page for the asset-versus-liability picture through the process.

Dates: check the primary

As of this writing, the exact closure timestamp and the API-withdrawal cut-off should be taken from BitMEX’s own closure FAQ, not from secondary coverage; the wind-down summary above follows The Paypers’ report of the announcement. A venue closing on a published clock is the same problem as a venue delisting on one — we walked through that mechanic when Kraken set its liquidation and withdrawal windows, and the lesson repeats: the calendar is the counterparty.

None of this is advice about what to hold or where. It is a fee schedule with an expiry date on it. Go and read the notice your account is actually governed by, then act on that.