Bit.com: The Exchange That Closed Without a Sound

Two days after Christmas 2025, while most of the trading world was on holiday, Bit.com told its customers it was closing. The announcement went out on its social media channels on 27 December and was confirmed by email. New sign-ups stopped that day. Customers holding bets on future prices could close them but not open new ones. Everything else would be switched off in stages, and by 31 March 2026 the exchange would be gone.

There was no hack, no frozen withdrawals and no missing money. The notice called it "a part of a business restructuring plan". In an industry where exchanges usually die with customers locked out, Bit.com handed out a timetable and stuck to it.

The exchange most people never heard of

Bit.com opened in August 2020. It belonged to Matrixport, a Singapore company set up in 2019 by Jihan Wu, the co-founder of Bitmain, the Chinese firm that builds most of the world's bitcoin mining machines. Matrixport sold crypto lending, custody (safekeeping coins for clients, the job a custodian bank does for shares) and investment products. Bit.com was meant to be its trading floor.

It was built for derivatives, not for people buying their first bitcoin. A derivative is a contract whose value depends on the price of something else. Bit.com listed two kinds. Futures are agreements to buy or sell at a set price later; its first product, on 3 August 2020, was a bitcoin "perpetual swap", a futures contract with no expiry date that traders can hold for as long as they keep paying a small fee. Options, launched on 17 August, work exactly like stock options: the right, but not the duty, to buy or sell bitcoin at a fixed price before a deadline.

The target was Deribit, the exchange that then handled more than 85% of all crypto options trading. Matrixport's chief operating officer, Daniel Yan, a former foreign-exchange options trader at Merrill Lynch, told The Block that one professional options exchange was "definitely not enough" and that Deribit "does not provide substantial liquidity", meaning there were not always enough buyers and sellers to trade large amounts without moving the price. He predicted the crypto options market could grow "30 to 100 times in the next five years". Bit.com started with about 50 staff and refused customers from the United States and Japan.

The early numbers looked good on paper. In September 2020 Bit.com said in a press release that it had become the second-largest bitcoin options market, with about $14 million of options traded a day. That was the company's own claim, and it never came close to Deribit's lead.

Cloud mining and engineered bets

Over time Bit.com added ordinary spot trading (buying and selling coins outright, as on a normal stock exchange) and two products aimed at wealthier clients. One was cloud mining: instead of buying and running a bitcoin mining machine, a customer rented a share of someone else's computing power for a fixed period and collected the bitcoin it earned, much like buying a share of a power station's output without owning the plant. The other was structured products, packaged bets of the kind private banks sell, such as notes that promise to return the original money while paying extra if the price of bitcoin lands in a certain range.

None of it gave Bit.com the scale it needed. The 2022 crash, which took down Celsius, Voyager, Three Arrows Capital and FTX, shrank the pool of professional crypto traders. When trading came back in 2024, the money flowed to the giants: Binance, Coinbase, Bybit and OKX. Deribit stayed the options leader, and in August 2025 Coinbase bought it for about $2.9 billion. The niche Bit.com was built to win had been bought by the largest crypto exchange in the United States.

How the lights went off

The shutdown ran in three steps, each with a date.

From 27 December 2025: no new users, no new futures or options positions, only closing existing ones.

In January 2026: the cloud mining service ended on 25 January, and customers with contracts still running got a refund for the days they had paid for but would not receive. Interest on investment products was calculated up to 30 January. Spot trading stopped on 31 January, the last day normal withdrawals ran.

From 1 February: whatever was left moved to what Bit.com called a "backup station", a stripped-down site where customers could only log in and withdraw. Small leftover balances that had not been swapped were converted automatically into USDT, a stablecoin (a digital dollar meant to stay worth one dollar), at the closing price. The exchange promised the assets "will not be cleared, confiscated, or otherwise disposed of". Customers were told they could also move their holdings across to Matrixport, and were warned about scammers posing as Bit.com staff. The last date to ask for a withdrawal through the backup station's customer service was 31 March 2026.

No complaints of lost funds were reported. The only people likely to have trouble were those who ignored the emails for three months.

The name outlived the exchange

Eleven days before the final deadline, on 20 March 2026, Matrixport renamed itself BIT, which it says stands for "Bridge into Tomorrow". The company, led by chief executive John Ge and co-founded by Cynthia Wu alongside Jihan Wu, said client accounts, legal entities and contracts were unchanged, and that it was exploring a possible listing in the United States. It now uses the bit.com address for the whole group. The name of the exchange it had just closed became the name of everything else it sells: custody, lending, wealth management and tokenised assets.

Bit.com was the first of several 2026 exchange closures, and the calmest. BitMEX shut on 23 September. CoinEx and BitMart announced closures of their own. AscendEX stopped on 1 July with $240 million gone from its wallets and customers still waiting. Mint Blockchain and the news site DL News closed too. Bit.com is the one where every step came with a date, and the dates were kept.