BitMEX is now facing lawsuits alleging it withheld collateral from traders and engaged in insider trading. The new lawsuit accuses Hayes and other co-founders, Ben Delo and Samuel Reed, of designing a system to keep customers safe and transfer the remaining bitcoin to the platform’s insurance fund.
“One lawsuit won’t move the market, but claims involving 622 BTC (worth over $40.5 million) of withheld collateral reinforce the oldest doubt in crypto: your money is safe until the day it isn’t,” said Samuel Videau, chief technology officer at Genius. “What ends up is opacity, the model where you plug assets into a black box and take the operator’s word for it.”
The overall crypto-derivatives market has hardly fallen back. The perpetual swap product BitMEX built now generates the majority of trading activity on major exchanges such as Binance and OKX, along with traditional platforms such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME).
“The derivatives market is now much larger and more diversified,” said Edwin Cheung, CEO of crypto trading platform Gate. “Most displaced volume will likely be absorbed by other established platforms.”
The shift suggests exchanges now need scale, regulatory compliance and broader services to survive, rather than relying on retail alone.
