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- Hotbit formally announces the closure of its CEX platform.
- All trading operations on the CEX closes today at May 22, UTC 4:00.
- Users have until June 21, UTC 4:00 to withdraw all their assets from the exchange.
One of the world’s most prominent cryptocurrency trading platforms, Hotbit, formally announces its closure. In an official online notice, the platform makes it clear that the following month will be the last of its operational days.
Just In: Hotbit, an exchange with 5 million users, announced the suspension of operations today, and users need to withdraw their remaining assets before June 21; the core reason is the deterioration of the operating conditions, Hotbit management team was forced to suspend…
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) May 22, 2023
In short, according to the tweet above, Hotbit says it will suspend all of its operations starting today. In addition, it says that all Hotbit users must withdraw all of their remaining assets from the platform before June 21, 2023.
In detail, Hotbit says its 5 year and 4 month long quest has the team expressing their pride over providing and guiding its 5 million crypto users across the world. Unfortunately, the notice says, it is time for the exchange to take its final bow.
The notice confirms that Hotbit will stop all CEX operations from May 22, UTC 4:00. Therefore, it requests all of its users to withdraw all assets by June 21, UTC 4:00. Accompanying this announcement are a few centric reasons behind the exchanges closure.
As it was for a few weeks in 2022, Hotbit’s management team was under a lot of pressure since August 2022 over an investigation crack down. During this incident, the exchange was forced to suspend operations for several weeks.
Following after, the crypto industry itself went through a tumultuous time, says the notice as part of the reasoning behind the closure. In detail, incidents such as the collapse of FTX, traditional banking crises, USDC off-pegging, and much more led to many CEX users pulling out their funds.
Furthermore, the changes in the crypto industry trend-wise, saw the collapse of many large and renowned centralized institutions. This pushed the industry to move in either two directions. The first being embracing regulations and the second being becoming more decentralized.
In the case of the latter, Hotbit believes CEXs are becoming cumbersome and complicated. More so, it says CEXs find it hard to comply with interconnected businesses. In either case, be it compliance or decentralization, Hotbit didn’t think it could meet long-term trends.
Despite being the first exchange to list emerging assets such as SHIB, the first to offer staking services from ATOM, and the first to conduct a DeFi mining business via Compound, Hotbit reminisces, the time has still come for the platform to end its story due to the uncertain state of the industry.
So far, Hotbit has taken hits from cyber attacks, malicious users, and more leading to critical losses. Finally, the notice says it is not an option for it to continue operating a model to support a wide range of assets from a risk management point of view.
The notice ends with a brief message to its users:
That’s all, with so many joys and tears, our show is over. We want to say thank you and take a bow now. We still believe a bright future about crypto innovation and some of us will still fight for it.