BitMEX announced it is shutting down. New positions halt on August 26, 2026, and the exchange closes for good on September 23. If you run bots there, your real deadline is the August one — here's why, and exactly how to move to Bybit, Bitget, or KuCoin without losing your strategy.
First, the human part.
BitMEX announced that after more than a decade, it is winding down operations. Whatever you think of how the story ends, the perpetual swap — the instrument that powers most of crypto derivatives trading today, on every exchange — was invented there. XBTUSD taught a generation of traders what an inverse contract is. We've been building trading automation since 2013, BitMEX has been part of that landscape for most of it, and plenty of HaasOnline TradeServer (HTS) users cut their teeth on its testnet. We're genuinely sad to see it go.
Now the practical part, because the clock is already running.
The dates that matter
| Date (UTC) | What happens |
|---|---|
| August 26, 2026, 04:00 UTC | New position placement halts. From this moment the exchange is reduce-only — you can close or shrink existing positions, but nothing can open. |
| September 23, 2026, 04:00 UTC | Full closure. Any position still open is force-closed by the exchange. |
| After closure | The site stays up for withdrawals and history only. Balances left behind are charged $50/month or 1% per year, whichever is greater. |
One more thing from BitMEX's own announcement worth repeating: expect phishing. Shutdown announcements are a magnet for fake "withdraw your funds here" emails. Only use links you typed yourself or bookmarked.
Why your real deadline is August 26, not September 23
If you trade manually, September 23 is your deadline. If you run bots, it isn't.
Almost every automated strategy — grid bots, DCA, market-making, signal-driven entries — works by opening positions. From August 26 at 04:00 UTC, every one of those order placements gets rejected. A grid bot on XBTUSD doesn't wind down gracefully in a reduce-only market; it just stops being able to do half its job, and its open exit orders slowly drain the position it's still holding. Whatever the bot was mid-cycle on becomes a manual cleanup problem.
In plain English: treat August 26 as the day your BitMEX bots stop working, and plan to have them deactivated — positions flat, orders cancelled — before that date, on your own terms rather than the exchange's.
Winding down on BitMEX: the checklist
- Before August 26: deactivate bots on BitMEX markets, cancel remaining open orders, and flatten positions while both sides of the book are still open and liquid.
- Before September 23: if you kept a position into the reduce-only window on purpose, close it yourself. Liquidity typically thins as a closure approaches — being force-closed into the final print is nobody's exit plan.
- Withdraw everything. Don't leave dust. Post-closure balances get eaten by the $50/month fee.
- Export what you need. Trade history, tax records, API logs — pull them while the interface is still fully alive.
Where to go — by what you trade
HaasOnline TradeServer Cloud supports all three of the exchanges below today, so your strategies move with you. The right destination depends on the contract type you're leaving behind.
| You traded on BitMEX | Closest match | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Inverse perpetuals (XBTUSD-style, BTC-margined) | Bitget or Bybit | Bitget's coin-margined futures give you BTC-margined contracts, and Bybit's inverse BTCUSD perpetual is the direct XBTUSD substitute — $1 contracts, margined and settled in BTC, deep book. Both are supported in HTS Cloud, and bot logic carries over with minimal changes. |
| USDT-margined perpetuals | Bitget, Bybit, or KuCoin | All three run liquid USDT-margined perps with HTS Cloud support. Pick on fees, available pairs, and jurisdiction. |
| Spot | Bitget, Bybit, or KuCoin | Spot strategies are the most portable of all — market structure differences are minimal. |
Account creation links, plain and simple: Bybit, Bitget, KuCoin.
One honest caveat before you pick: these venues are similar to BitMEX, not identical. Fee schedules, tick sizes, funding-rate mechanics, and contract specs all differ in the details, and a grid or market-making configuration tuned to XBTUSD's microstructure deserves a re-check — not a blind copy — before it trades real size somewhere new.
Migrating a bot in HTS Cloud, step by step
- Create the account and API key on the new exchange. Enable trading permissions on the key; withdrawals should stay disabled — your bot never needs them.
- Connect it in HTS Cloud. Add the exchange account under your account settings, same flow you used for BitMEX.
- Recreate the bot on the new market. Your scripts and bot configurations aren't tied to BitMEX — point the same strategy at the new market. Double-check order sizing: contract conventions differ between exchanges, and an amount that meant $10,000 on XBTUSD may mean something else entirely on another venue's contract.
- Backtest before going live. Run the strategy against the new market's history. Funding rates and spread behavior are where "the same" strategy quietly becomes a different one.
- Start small, then scale. Let it run at reduced size for a few days, confirm fills and fees look like the backtest, then bring it up to full size — well before the August 26 cutoff removes your fallback.
If you get stuck anywhere in the move, our support team and the community Discord have both been through exchange migrations before — ask early rather than the week of the deadline.
The end of an era, not of a strategy
Exchanges come and go — that's been true for the entire life of this industry, and it's exactly why we've always built HTS to be exchange-agnostic. The strategy you spent months tuning is yours, not BitMEX's. Moving it is a weekend project, not a rebuild.
If you're arriving here from BitMEX and don't run HaasOnline TradeServer yet: HTS Cloud automates strategies across every major exchange, with backtesting and a full Lua-based scripting language (HaasScript) — you can start a free 7-day trial and have a bot running on Bybit, Bitget, or KuCoin before your BitMEX wind-down is finished.
Nothing here is financial advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results, and only deploy capital you can afford to have at risk.