BitMEX will settle four September futures contracts on Monday at 12:00 UTC. That is forty six days ahead of schedule. The exchange had listed XRPU26, ADAU26, ETHU26 and XBTUSDTU26 with a settlement date of 25 September at 12:00 UTC, which falls two days after BitMEX itself stops operating on 23 September at 04:00 UTC.
A quarterly book that outlived its own venue
The closure notice went out on 23 July. BitMEX told users the venue would sunset after eleven years and halted new registrations that day, as we covered at the time. The quarterly contracts stayed listed for another two weeks. Only this month did BitMEX publish the notice pulling all four of them forward to 10 August.
Three of the four rates came back at 1.00
Dragging a future forward costs the holder the carry they paid for, so the settlement price gets an adjustment. BitMEX took the thirty minute time weighted average of the Fair Basis between 03:00 and 03:30 UTC on 6 August, then applied that figure across the span between the original settlement and the new one. Four numbers came out of it.
| Contract | Adjustment rate |
|---|---|
| XRPU26 | 1.00 |
| ADAU26 | 1.00 |
| ETHU26 | 1.00 |
| XBTUSDTU26 | 1.03 |
Only the bitcoin against tether contract carried a premium, three percent across those forty six days. The XRP, Cardano and ether quarterlies came back flat. That is what a dead basis looks like once it reaches settlement math, and it means nobody on those three books had been paying for time. How an index gets built now decides real money, which is the substance of CME's objection to Nasdaq listing bitcoin options on a CME index.
Eighteen more contracts go on Tuesday
A second notice sets 11 August at 12:00 UTC as the moment BitMEX delists eighteen derivatives contracts. The stated reason runs to one line.
We've decided to delist these contracts due to insufficient trading interest in these contracts and the closure of the BitMEX exchange.
Culls on that scale usually read as housekeeping, the way three exchanges clearing 31 pairs and seven tokens in a single week did in May. This one clears shelves nobody will restock. For contrast, Kraken's delisting queue reached 56 tokens last week and Kraken is still open for business.
CoinGecko currently shows BitMEX turning over $15.2 million in a day, with $110.7 million of open interest spread across 78 perpetual pairs. In 2019 the exchange cleared more than a trillion dollars a year and held roughly 57 percent of crypto derivatives, according to CoinDesk.
After Monday and Tuesday the next hard date is 26 August at 04:00 UTC. Risk limits go reduce only from that point, so positions can shrink and cannot grow, and BitMEX force closes whatever is still open between then and 23 September. CoinDesk reported that balances left behind attract a $50 monthly maintenance fee or a one percent annual levy. Anyone waiting has six weeks and a working withdrawal desk, which is more than the 58 wallets that got money out of BitMart started with.
