Companies Change. Bitcoin Doesn't.

It's Bitcoin Tuesday!—Jul. 28, 2026

Jul 28, 2026

Companies Change.

Bitcoin Doesn’t.

BitMEX announcing it is shutting down feels like more than another exchange closing its doors. It feels like the end of an era.

For many of us who have been around Bitcoin for more than one cycle, BitMEX wasn’t just another place to trade. It helped define an entire generation of crypto markets. Arthur Hayes and his team pioneered the perpetual swap, introduced 100x leverage to a global audience, and built an exchange that became synonymous with aggressive speculation.

Overnight liquidations, funding rates, massive short squeezes, and traders turning a few thousand dollars into fortunes, or losing everything just as quickly, became part of crypto folklore.

Whether you loved it or hated it, BitMEX changed crypto trading forever. Its legacy, however, was never really about Bitcoin.

It was about appetite.

Appetite for leverage.
Appetite for risk.
Appetite for volatility.
Appetite for possibility.

In many ways, BitMEX represented the antithesis of what Bitcoin was created to be. Bitcoin removes trusted intermediaries, encourages individual ownership, and rewards long-term thinking.

BitMEX built a business around doing the exact opposite. It thrived by encouraging traders to borrow heavily, speculate aggressively, and treat Bitcoin less like a savings technology and more like a casino chip.

That isn’t necessarily a criticism. Markets need traders. They provide liquidity, facilitate price discovery, and create healthier markets over the long run.

But traders and long-term savers are very different participants. Bitcoin doesn’t need leverage to succeed. BitMEX did. It was its lifeblood.

Now, as BitMEX winds down and exchanges like BitMart also scale back operations in certain jurisdictions, it feels like another page in Bitcoin’s history has turned.

These closures aren’t remotely comparable to the failures of Celsius, Voyager, Three Arrows Capital, BlockFi, or FTX, but they’re still telling us something important about where we are in the cycle.

The speculative appetite simply isn’t what it used to be. Trading volumes have thinned. Capital is flowing elsewhere.

The business models that depended on constant leverage and endless activity are finding that surviving a bear market is harder than riding out a bull market.

Just like every cycle before it.

Every Cycle Has Its Theme

Earlier this year, I wrote about the idea that every Bitcoin cycle develops its own personality. Looking back, it’s remarkable how easy it is to identify each one not by Bitcoin itself, but by the businesses and narratives that flourished before eventually giving way to reality.

The early years taught us about exchange risk. Mt. Gox. BitInstant. BTC-e. Cryptsy. Countless smaller exchanges around the world either failed outright, succumbed to poor security, struggled under regulatory pressure, or simply couldn’t survive when trading activity dried up.

Many people blamed Bitcoin.

History proved otherwise.

Bitcoin kept producing blocks while the companies built around it came and went.

The 2017 cycle became synonymous with the ICO boom. Thousands of new tokens promised to reinvent nearly every industry imaginable.

Investors poured billions into whitepapers before products existed. Hype was more valuable than execution. Speculative capital chased the next hundred-fold return.

Most of those projects didn’t survive.

NFTs carried that same speculative energy into the following cycle. Digital collectibles exploded into mainstream culture almost overnight.

Celebrities joined in. Record prices made headlines. Then, just as quickly as they arrived, valuations collapsed and the excitement faded.

The defining theme of the 2021 cycle, however, was crypto lending.

Deposit your bitcoin.

Earn 8%.
Earn 10%.
Earn even more.

The promises sounded irresistible until they weren’t. Celsius. Voyager. Three Arrows Capital. BlockFi. Then of course… FTX.

Those companies didn’t fail because Bitcoin failed. They failed because centralized businesses run by people made poor decisions, took excessive risks, or in some cases committed outright fraud.

As I discussed in How We Got Here, the bull market rewarded increasingly risky behavior until the bear market inevitably exposed it.

This cycle feels different.

The excesses haven’t disappeared.

They’ve simply changed.

Instead of watching lending platforms implode under hidden leverage, we’re watching entire business models struggle to justify their existence.

A wave of Bitcoin treasury companies entered the public markets with ambitious plans to accumulate bitcoin and create shareholder value. Some have built disciplined businesses with conservative balance sheets and long-term strategies. Others have already discovered that raising capital during a bull market is much easier than preserving shareholder value during a prolonged downturn.

At the same time, centralized exchanges are facing a different challenge. People simply aren’t trading like they used to.

That’s partly because bear markets naturally reduce speculation, but it’s also because speculative capital has found new opportunities.

Artificial intelligence has dominated investor attention. Space companies have become one of the market’s newest obsessions. High-profile IPOs continue attracting billions of dollars that, in another cycle, might have flowed into crypto trading accounts.

Crypto no longer has a monopoly on speculation. When traders leave, exchanges feel it first. For businesses whose revenue depends on trading volume, leverage, and perpetual activity, shrinking participation creates a very different operating environment.

BitMEX wasn’t built around people quietly dollar-cost averaging into bitcoin for the next twenty years. It was built around traders chasing the next move.

When the appetite disappears…

So does the business.

Bitcoin is special.

You NEED to protect it.

10 Rules to Not Lose Bitcoin

Bitcoin Keeps Showing Up

One of the easiest mistakes to make in this industry is confusing the businesses built around Bitcoin and crypto with Bitcoin itself.

Exchanges, treasury companies, custodians, lenders, brokerages, and ETF issuers are all businesses. Some are exceptionally managed and will survive every cycle.

Others were built for the bull market and are just now discovering how difficult it is to survive an entire market cycle. Bitcoin exists outside all of them.

Bitcoin doesn’t need perpetual swaps, 100x leverage, venture capital, or hundreds of exchanges to function. Reputable exchanges and financial institutions have undoubtedly made Bitcoin more accessible, and that’s a positive development. But Bitcoin has never depended on any single company for its survival.

That’s what every bear market ultimately reminds us. It isn’t auditing Bitcoin. It’s auditing the businesses built around Bitcoin.

Some emerge stronger.

Others quietly disappear.

The names change every four years.

The process though, rarely does.

The lesson isn’t: avoid exchanges. They’re a key on-ramp into Bitcoin and an important part of a healthy market. The lesson is to understand their role.

Use exchanges to buy and sell bitcoin, but don’t mistake convenience for ownership. Don’t leave more bitcoin on an exchange than you’re willing to lose.

Learn how to self-custody it, keep your setup simple, and be skeptical of anyone promising yield in exchange for giving up control of your bitcoin.

I’ve written more about these ideas in 10 Rules to Not Lose Bitcoin and Holding Bitcoin Off Exchanges because self-custody isn’t about paranoia. It’s about understanding what makes Bitcoin fundamentally different from the financial institutions built around it.

BitMEX marks the end of one era of crypto trading, but it won’t be the last exchange to disappear, nor will it be the last business model exposed by a bear market.

Every cycle leaves something behind.