BitMex announces that they were closing up shop a few weeks ago. I'm sure lots of us were wondering what would happen to Jonathan Biers excellent blog (I believe there were other authors of the blog as well, but Biers is always who I've associated it with).

Today, the BitMex Research account posted an announcement that they are spinning off to become Farside Insights. The announcement covers what they will be doing and why they think BitMex shut down, as well as some interesting details about pieces of data collection/analysis formerly run by BitMex Research that will now be taken over by localhost research, and also what will be happening to the BitMex Bitcoin research grants. The whole article is worth a read:

The End Of BitMEX ResearchThe End Of BitMEX Research

As was announced on 23 July 2026, BitMEX will gracefully wind down on 23 September 2026. This of course also means the end of BitMEX Research, after almost 10 years. The BitMEX Research blog was particularly prolific in producing content in the short period from October 2017 to April 2018, the period in which BitMEX Research built its reputation. In this same timeframe, the BitMEX trading platform was also delivering an exceptional service. In this period the company established itself as a true industry titan, with BitMEX surpassing Bitfinex as the most significant venue for Bitcoin’s price formation.

If one is interested in reading more about BitMEX, there is some coverage in our book "Reckless: The Story Of Cryptocurrency Interest Rates".

Below, we have provided an interesting collection of articles on the history of BitMEX:

• Coindesk - Jul 2026
• The Blind Spot - Jan 2026 - By @izakaminska
• Adapt or Die - Nov 2025 - By @CryptoHayes
• Vanity Fair - Apr 2021

Many have asked about the reason the platform decided to shut down. The truth is simply that a significant number of clients left the platform, such that it is not worth continuing to operate the business. In our view, several factors contributed to this, in no particular order:

1. The company being too slow to adopt stablecoins.
2. Regulatory challenges and KYC.
3. Fraudulent platforms like FTX winning BitMEX clients by copying the frontend and faking the backend, such that the user experience was superior.
4. A loss in reputation and liquidity following the March 2020 downtime.
5. A management team, appointed beneath the founders, which in our opinion lacked sufficient expertise in the crypto space.
6. The company failing to effectively manage challenges of growth, in a very classical way, with cultural schisms forming between tech people and finance people, as well as Asian based people and US based people.

BitMEX also got a lot of things right. For instance, the company didn’t compromise on wallet security for years, sticking to a manual once per day 3 of 4 P2SH multi-signature system. This is despite the temptation to have a hot wallet and enable more timely customer withdrawals. The company also never compromised on its automated real time audits and reconciliations, preferring to potentially lose customers, showing clients “order submission error”, rather than taking shortcuts in the trading engine calculations.

BitMEX ResearchBitMEX Research

As many have noticed already, the @BitMEXResearch X handle has been renamed as @FarsideInsights (this account). Farside is an investment advisor for a long only actively managed equity fund, unrelated to BitMEX. Farside is known for its automated Bitcoin ETF flow updates. The historic BitMEX Research blog content is still up on the BitMEX website. Links to all BitMEX Research content can also be found on archive.is here:

We are also working on releasing all the BitMEX Research blog content under the CC BY 4.0 license, which hopefully the company will be able to do before it shuts down in September. This is not yet confirmed.

As for future blog posts, we may publish more posts, either under the Farside banner or with some other entity, should we obtain another sponsorship contract. However, posts may be less frequent going forward.

Localhost ResearchLocalhost Research

With the closure of BitMEX Research, the sponsorship of bitnod.es and forkmonitor.info has been taken over by @lclhostresearch. I am extremely grateful to Localhost Research for their support. The plan is to continue to build and improve these services.

With the new expanded budget, we have already built new features, including more regional coverage for the nodes connected to ForkMonitor, with Bitcoin nodes running in Japan, Qatar, Britain, Finland and Chile.

Open Source Developer GrantsOpen Source Developer Grants

In 2019, BitMEX launched an open source Bitcoin developer grant program, which I helped administer. BitMEX donated over $2m to open source Bitcoin developers, including grants, in no particular order to:

• Michael Ford
• Gleb Naumenko
• Calvin Kim
• Sjors Provoost
• Rene Pickhardt
• Chris Coverdale
• Amiti Uttarwar
• Jeremy Rubin
• And indirect grants to Brink and the MIT DCI

I would like to thank Gregory Sanders and Chris Shucksmith for sitting with me on the grant committee. I am extremely grateful to the BitMEX co-founders, Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo and Sam Reed, for supporting this initiative, with their kind generosity. BitMEX was the first profitable operating company in the space to give no-string attached grants to Bitcoin developers. At the time, BitMEX was an industry leader, that many other companies wanted to emulate. As a result of this, other companies copied the grant funding idea and the open source funding environment considerably improved in the 2019 to 2021 period.

The BitMEX grant program is now continuing under a separate banner, Maelstrom, which is the family office of Arthur Hayes. One can read the Maelstrom Grant program annual report for the period ended June 2026 here.

Final ThoughtsFinal Thoughts

I very much enjoyed my time with BitMEX, especially the 2017 to 2019 period. It was exciting, challenging, unpredictable and fun. The three co-founders demonstrated strong entrepreneurial acumen in developing the perpetual swap contract at the right time, winning clients and building an intelligent, motivated and united team in those early days.

The perpetual swap contract obviously continues to succeed and just as many in BitMEX had predicted years ago, it is finally starting to make significant progress into non-crypto based contracts, such as equities and commodities. But alas, BitMEX will no longer be part of this and it hasn’t been a major part of it for several years.