Update, 17 September 2026: BitMEX derivatives are gone. XBTUSD, XBTUSDT, ETHUSD, ETHUSDT and the remaining quarterlies settled early, on 16 September at 12:00 UTC, a week ahead of the announced closing date, with open interest at zero. Only spot pairs are still trading, until 23 September at 04:00 UTC, when the exchange closes for good. BitMEX derivative markets no longer appear in HaasOnline TradeServer, because the contracts no longer exist. If you still hold a balance there, withdraw it now. Everything below still applies if your bots have not moved yet.
BitMEX has shut down. Its derivatives settled on 16 September 2026 and the exchange closes completely on 23 September. If your bots traded there, the strategy itself is not lost: here is how the wind-down ran, and exactly how to move to Bybit, Bitget, or KuCoin without rebuilding it.
First, the human part.
BitMEX announced in July that after more than a decade, it was 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.
How the wind-down ran
| Date (UTC) | What happened |
|---|---|
| August 26, 2026, 04:00 UTC | New position placement halted. From that moment the exchange was reduce-only: existing positions could be closed or shrunk, but nothing could open. |
| September 16, 2026, 12:00 UTC | All derivatives settled, a week earlier than the announced closing date. XBTUSD settled at 76,095.46. Open interest went to zero, and the perpetual and quarterly markets stopped existing. |
| September 23, 2026, 04:00 UTC | Full closure. Spot trading ends with it. |
| 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, and they keep arriving after the exchange is gone. Only use links you typed yourself or bookmarked.
Why bot traders ran out of time first
Manual traders had until the final closure. Bot traders did not, and this is the part worth carrying into the next exchange wind-down you live through.
Almost every automated strategy (grid bots, DCA, market-making, signal-driven entries) works by opening positions. Once the exchange went reduce-only on 26 August, every one of those order placements was rejected. A grid bot on XBTUSD does not wind down gracefully in a reduce-only market: it just stops being able to do half its job, while its open exit orders slowly drain the position it is still holding. Anything a bot was mid-cycle on became a manual cleanup problem, four weeks before the announced deadline. The early settlement on 16 September then closed the rest by force.
What is left to do on BitMEX
- Withdraw everything, before 23 September. 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.
- Clean up your side. Delete the BitMEX API keys from HTS and anywhere else you stored them, and remove or repoint the bots that used them. BitMEX derivative markets are no longer available in HTS, so those bots have nothing to trade.
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 (on a Bitget Unified Trading Account), 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, because 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, because 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, so 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.
If you get stuck anywhere in the move, our support team and the community Discord have both been through exchange migrations before, so ask early rather than after something has gone sideways.
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 this week.
Nothing here is financial advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results, and only deploy capital you can afford to have at risk.