Crypto researchers claim crypto exchange BitMart is processing withdrawals at a dramatically slow rate after it announced plans to shut down its operations next year.

BitMart claimed that after assessing its “operating conditions, market environment, and future strategic direction,” its operations would cease to exist on January 31, 2027 — a decision at odds with its seemingly bullish outlook.

Deposits, new account registrations, and new trades have already been disabled, and by August 21, all services will cease except for withdrawals.

It “strongly” recommends that users submit withdrawal requests before August 26. 

Additionally, the exchange warned that because it “generally” processes withdrawals based on the order of submission, “processing times may be extended due to a high volume of withdrawal requests.”

Crypto researcher Quang noted that in the 24 hours after BitMart’s announcement, the exchange only processed 63 withdrawal requests, together worth around $800,000.

They assessed that users with large balances will likely be waiting a long time, and that if you have anything less than $10, “you might as well say goodbye to it.”

Read more: European Union sanctions Justin Sun’s HTX

Crypto analyst Lookonchain also noted that by 7:40 pm EST, the exchange had stopped processing withdrawals for the past eight hours. 

The exchange’s API appears to paint a slightly different picture, however. Despite shutting down, it still appeared to have processed $1.8 billion in 24-hour volume.

At time of writing, BitMart is ranked third on CoinGecko for 24-hour volume, behind Binance with $6 billion and Poloniex with over $2 billion. 

BitMart was supposed to last another eight years

BitMart had presented a bullish outlook for its operations in this year’s H1 report published earlier this month.  

A license to operate in Australia was secured, and the company was expanding in Europe via a partnership with Zero Hash. 

Transaction volume was up 300%, BitMart’s assets under management grew roughly “256% period-over-period,” and it had just launched its own prediction market.

BitMart CEO Nathan Chow also said that, “BitMart is eight years old this year. We intend to be here for the next eight, and we are building accordingly.” 

He said, “H1 2026 was a market that punished platforms optimizing for the last cycle and rewarded platforms building for the next one. Our numbers reflect that choice.”

Nobody told Chow BitMart was closing 

Despite Chow’s statements, he appears not to have gotten the memo about BitMart’s closure. 

After its announcement, Chow posted on X claiming “I was not involved in the decision announced today, not consulted on it, and not informed of it. I learned of it when it became public.”

Read more: BitMEX to close, but what about its $270M insurance fund?

He says BitMart told him on July 24 that his role was being terminated and would start winding down immediately. For the next two days, he had no involvement with the company. 

Chow thanked his colleagues whom he worked with, and said that he is concerned for BitMart’s users and its employees.

Month of failing crypto firms

Several crypto firms have made major negative announcements this month.

Today, the crypto-based data storage firm Storj announced that it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Crypto firm Movement Labs also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, crypto exchange BitMex announced it was shutting down, and Justin Sun’s HTX was sanctioned by the EU.

In Storj’s case, the firm would continue to operate after the restructuring and give token holders a stake in the newly restructured firm.

Protos has reached out to BitMart for comment and will update this piece should we hear anything back.

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Founded in 2018 as SEBA Bank and rebranded as AMINA in 2023, the lender is overseen by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, FINMA. It is one of a small number of regulated banks focused on digital assets. The company offers crypto trading, custody, staking and lending services to institutional and professional investors, and has expanded into Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong and India.

The crypto industry has embraced public markets over the past year, with listings from companies including Circle Internet (CRCL), CoinDesk’s owner Bullish (BLSH), Gemini Space Station (GEMI), BitGo (BTGO) and Figure (FIGR) marking the sector’s strongest IPO wave since 2021.

While the deals initially drew strong investor demand, post-listing performance has been uneven as weaker crypto prices, slowing trading activity and a broader risk-off environment weighed on valuations.

This has prompted some private companies to delay or reconsider their own public market plans. Several major crypto firms, including Kraken parent Payward, Ethereum app builder Consensys, wallet provider Ledger and asset manager Grayscale, have delayed IPO plans while waiting for markets to improve.

As of year-end 2025, AMINA reported 74.6 million francs ($91 million) in Tier 1 capital. It has raised roughly $245 million from investors including Julius Baer, DeFi Technologies and BlackRiver Asset Management.

Tokenization specialist Securitize (SECZ) is expanding its regulatory footprint, adding an investment adviser registration as the company positions itself to serve a growing number of institutional investors bringing traditional assets onto blockchain rails.

Securitize said Monday that its subsidiary, Securitize Capital, has registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as an investment adviser. The new license adds to the firm’s existing regulated businesses, which include a broker-dealer, alternative trading system (ATS), transfer agent and fund administration services.

The move comes as regulators have begun examining how existing securities rules apply to a new generation of investment products on blockchain rails. Last week, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said that certain crypto vaults and lending strategies could fall under investment adviser regulations depending on how they’re structured and managed.

Vaults have become one of decentralized finance’s fastest-growing products, allowing users to deposit crypto into smart contracts that automatically allocate capital across lending markets and other yield-generating strategies. Increasingly, those products are being adopted beyond DeFi by platforms reaching a broader investor base such as Coinbase and Robinhood to offer yield on customer balances. Curated vaults now hold about $8.6 billion in assets, according to Vaults.fyi data.

Strategy, the corporate software firm best known for its large Bitcoin treasury, continued to reshape its capital structure last week by selling common stock under its at-the-market program and repurchasing preferred shares.

According to company disclosures, Strategy sold 5,429,160 shares of its Class A common stock through an at-the-market (ATM) offering between July 20 and July 26, generating $544.5 million in net proceeds. In parallel, the company repurchased 288,930 shares of its STRC preferred stock for $25 million, as detailed in a Form 8-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday.

Key takeaways

• Strategy raised $544.5 million in net proceeds from an at-the-market sale of 5.43 million Class A shares between July 20 and July 26.
• In the same period, the company spent $25 million to repurchase 288,930 shares of STRC preferred stock.
• Strategy’s U.S. dollar reserve increased to $3.75 billion as of July 26, up from $3.225 billion the prior week.
• Strategy reported no Bitcoin purchases or sales during July 20-26, leaving its holdings unchanged at 843,775 BTC.
• The move follows Michael Saylor’s latest social media post, which some observers interpreted as a potential signal about future preferred-stock strategy.

ATM stock sales and STRC preferred buyback

Strategy’s latest financing activity combined two parts: common stock issuance and preferred share repurchases. The Class A share sales were executed via Strategy’s at-the-market offering, allowing the company to issue shares in smaller increments rather than a single large raise.

The preferred buyback is notable because it suggests the company is not only expanding its liquidity through equity markets, but also actively managing its preferred instrument in the capital stack. The $25 million repurchase covered 288,930 shares of STRC preferred stock, per the SEC Form 8-K filed Monday.

While market pricing can shift quickly around corporate actions, Yahoo Finance data cited in the original reporting indicated Strategy’s Class A shares were up more than 2% in Monday’s premarket trading, and STRC preferred shares were higher ahead of the Nasdaq open.

Bitcoin holdings unchanged as cash reserves grow

Despite the increased equity activity, Strategy reported no Bitcoin trades during the July 20-26 window. The company stated its BTC holdings remained at 843,775 BTC, acquired at an average purchase price of $75,476 per Bitcoin, representing an aggregate cost basis of $63.69 billion.

At the time of publication, Bitcoin was reported as trading around $64,971. Strategy’s lack of BTC buying or selling during this specific period means the new liquidity primarily supports corporate objectives rather than immediate additions to its treasury.

Strategy also highlighted how the company intends to use its expanded cash: maintaining liquidity as it increases capital markets activity through common stock offerings and preferred stock instruments. The growing dollar reserve is designed to support dividend payments on preferred stock and interest payments on its outstanding debt.

From “another color” to expectations on preferred strategy

The financing update arrived after executive chairman Michael Saylor sparked speculation on Sunday with an X post referencing “another color.” Some market observers interpreted the phrase as a hint that Strategy could implement additional actions related to its preferred stock approach.

Separately, the preferred stock repurchase and the continued buildup of cash reserves underscore that Strategy’s capital structure management remains tightly linked to its broader treasury and funding strategy. For investors, the key issue is how these moves affect future returns and risk: common stock issuance can dilute shareholders if priced below intrinsic value, while preferred repurchases may reduce fixed obligations, depending on the terms and market conditions.

Saylor reignites debate over banks and Bitcoin’s path

Strategy’s latest corporate filings also surfaced in the context of renewed discussion prompted by Saylor about Bitcoin’s relationship with traditional finance. On X, Saylor argued that rejecting Bitcoin’s connection to financial infrastructure would restrict access to most potential users, suggesting that integration with banks is necessary for broader adoption.

That position drew pushback from some Bitcoin supporters who contend the network’s original intent—outlined in Bitcoin’s white paper as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system—was to reduce the need for financial intermediaries. The exchange highlighted an enduring divide inside the ecosystem: one camp views banks and legacy rails as essential gateways to mainstream usage, while the other sees such involvement as a risk to Bitcoin’s decentralized foundation.

In practice, Strategy sits in the middle of that tension. As a publicly traded company with a large BTC treasury, its operations depend on conventional capital markets. Its use of common stock offerings and preferred instruments illustrates how corporate Bitcoin exposure often relies on the same financial infrastructure that some Bitcoin purists view with skepticism.

Going forward, investors will likely watch whether Strategy’s expanded cash reserve is followed by additional BTC purchases in subsequent reporting windows, and whether Saylor’s “another color” comment evolves into specific preferred-stock actions. The immediate uncertainty remains the timing and purpose of the next treasury decisions—whether liquidity is mainly for near-term corporate obligations or for accelerating Bitcoin accumulation later.

“This is the biggest change to how Lido Core staking works since Lido V2,” said Isidoros Passadis, chief of staking at Lido Labs Foundation. “The node operators securing the majority of ETH staked via Lido are consolidating onto far fewer validators, and for the first time, they’re backing that stake with their own capital, leaving the validator set underpinning Lido Core much leaner and better secured.”

Ecosystem builders had questioned whether enforcing capital bonds would drive away established node operators. Lido confirmed that all 34 of its existing curated operators are expected to transition to CMv2, with none planning to leave because of the bond requirement.

“Rather than replacing the existing reputation-based model, the bonds complement it with real economic accountability,” Will Shannon, head of node operator mechanisms at Lido Labs Foundation, said in an interview with CoinDesk.

He also said the migration will use a separate consensus-layer consolidation queue rather than Ethereum’s deposit and activation queue. Lido estimates that the transition will reduce annual staking rewards across the protocol by about 0.28%. Validators will continue earning rewards until they exit, with any missed rewards limited to the period before their balances reach the new validators.

A venue clearing more than $200 billion a month, holding roughly 70% of on-chain perpetuals volume, is secured by 27 validators. Its foundation ran every one of them at launch. Both the critics and the defenders are working from stale numbers, so here is the audit: what the set looks like now, which powers actually exist, and where the honest gap remains.

The most valuable thing about a decentralization argument is usually the data it forces into the open, and the Hyperliquid version has been running on stale data for eighteen months. In January 2025 a node operator published a letter noting that five foundation validators controlled more than 81% of staked HYPE across a set of sixteen, and that number entered the discourse and never left it. In June 2026, a prominent investor declared the network not permissionless at all, citing validators concentrated in a single building, node software that remains closed, and a foundation that can jail operators and force upgrades on them. Both interventions were treated as verdicts. Neither reflected the current state of the network, which had by then expanded to 27 validators with foundation-run nodes holding slightly less than half the stake, and neither engaged with what the protocol’s own documentation says about the powers in dispute. Meanwhile the thing being argued over kept growing: a venue processing more than $200 billion a month, holding roughly 70% of decentralized perpetuals volume, generating on the order of a billion dollars a year in fees, with an order book, a matching engine, and a liquidation system all running on those 27 machines. This piece is the audit both sides have been arguing without: the set as it stands, the powers as documented, the precedent where those powers actually fired, and the gap that survives every correction.

The set, counted

Start with the trajectory, because the direction is the part the standing critique omits.

Hyperliquid launched with a handful of validators, all run by the foundation, in what amounted to a permissioned network wearing a public ticker. The set expanded to 16 in January 2025, the moment that produced the original decentralization letter and the 81% concentration figure. In April 2025 the foundation restructured registration itself: the set moved to 21 nodes, with registration open to anyone and the 21 largest by stake forming the active set, which converted validator status from an appointment into an auction. Growth continued through 24 to 27 as of June 2026, with a stake threshold to enter that has run above a million HYPE, a number that itself functions as the network’s real admission price.

The concentration figure moved with it. Following a round of redelegations from foundation validators in June, foundation-run nodes hold approximately 49.3% of staked HYPE, with about 50.7% distributed across 22 independent operators. The foundation runs five validators of the 27. That is a materially different network from the one described by the 81% figure still circulating in criticism, and any honest audit has to lead with the improvement before cataloguing what remains.

The mechanics underneath are worth stating precisely, because they define who can participate. Consensus is delegated proof of stake: validators require a minimum self-delegation of 10,000 HYPE locked for a year, delegators face a one-day lock and a seven-day unstaking queue, and rewards accrue continuously with automatic recompounding. There is no automatic slashing anywhere in the system, which is unusual and cuts both ways: no operator loses stake for a mistake, and no operator loses stake for misbehavior either, leaving the unstaking queue and social consequences as the enforcement layer. Governance runs on delegated stake weight, with validators declaring positions and outcomes determined by the tokens behind them, not by validator headcount, which means the concentration number is the governance number, not a trivium.

The three powers, examined

Now the specific allegations, taken one at a time against the documentation, because two of the three survive and one does not.

Jailing. The claim that has traveled furthest is that the foundation can jail a validator for any reason and remove it from the active set. The protocol documentation describes something different: validators can be jailed through peer voting for latency and reliability failures, and a jailed validator stops producing rewards for its delegators until unjailed, with no slashing attached. Peer-triggered removal for performance is standard practice across proof-of-stake networks and is not foundation discretion. The residual concern is real but narrower than the accusation: when foundation-affiliated nodes hold close to half the stake, peer voting weighted by that stake is not fully independent of the foundation, so the mechanism is only as neutral as the distribution underneath it. That is an argument about concentration, which is the argument this piece keeps returning to, and not an argument about arbitrary power.

Forced upgrades. The claim that validators must adopt protocol upgrades is essentially accurate and largely unremarkable. Every chain running a single client implementation faces the same reality: nodes that decline an upgrade fall out of consensus, which is a coordination fact, not a governance power. What makes it sharper here is the single-binary architecture. Hyperliquid runs one implementation, which the foundation has defended by pointing out that Solana operated the same way for years. The defense is honest and incomplete: single-client networks concentrate the risk that a bug or a decision in one codebase becomes the whole network’s bug or decision, which is precisely why Ethereum’s client diversity is treated as a security property instead of an inefficiency.

Closed source. This one stands, and it is the most consequential of the three. The node software has remained closed, with the foundation’s position since early 2025 being that the code will open when it is stable, citing development speed and security. Eighteen months and considerable growth later, the promise is still outstanding, and it is the crux of the June criticism: a validator running a binary it cannot read is trusting the author in a way that no amount of stake distribution fixes. Users can verify state on-chain, but nobody outside the team can independently verify what the software does before it produces that state. For a venue clearing $200 billion a month, that is the single widest gap between what the network claims and what an outsider can check.

The precedent: when the powers fired

Governance arguments stay abstract until an incident makes them concrete, and Hyperliquid’s arrived in March 2025 with a memecoin called JELLY.

A trader opened a large position and manipulated the thin spot market underneath it, engineering losses that landed on the protocol’s liquidity vault, the pool that absorbs liquidated positions on behalf of depositors. With the vault facing an eight-figure hit, validators voted to delist the market and settle it at a price favorable to the protocol, and the loss was contained. The intervention worked, users were protected, and the affair was over within hours.

It also answered the governance question empirically. A market that traded on a network can be closed by a stake-weighted vote when the network’s own capital is at risk, and the vote at that time ran through a validator set in which the foundation held a decisive share, which is why the episode was described in the trade press as a validator put: an implicit guarantee that the house will intervene when the house is losing. Two readings follow, and both are defensible. The generous one is that any exchange, decentralized or otherwise, must be able to halt manipulation, and a venue that let a vault be drained by an obvious attack would deserve the criticism it received instead. The unforgiving one is that decentralization is only tested at the moment intervention becomes attractive, and Hyperliquid intervened. What the incident settles is not whether the network is good or bad but what it is: a venue with a functioning emergency brake and a small number of hands on it. Traders should price that accordingly, in both directions, since the same brake that protected vault depositors in March 2025 is the brake that could close a market a trader is winning in.

The comparison that survives every correction

Strip out the stale numbers and the overstated claims, and one gap remains that no redelegation fixes: the set is very small relative to what it secures.

Twenty-seven validators sits against roughly 1,800 on Solana, several hundred on Cosmos Hub, and hundreds of thousands on Ethereum. The technical counterargument is legitimate and worth stating properly: Byzantine fault tolerant consensus does not require thousands of participants for safety, it requires an honest supermajority within whatever set exists, and a small high-performance set is exactly how the network achieves the sub-second finality that makes an on-chain order book viable at all. Hyperliquid’s entire product advantage, matching and finality fast enough to compete with centralized venues, is purchased with validator-set size. That is a deliberate trade, not an oversight.

The question is whether the price is right at this scale, and the arithmetic is uncomfortable. A set of 27 secures a venue processing over $200 billion monthly, with open interest, vault deposits, and now equity-linked and other builder-deployed markets on top. The attack surface that matters is not cryptographic but social and regulatory: 27 operators are 27 phone calls, 27 jurisdictions to subpoena, 27 relationships to pressure, and the foundation’s near-half stake means a much smaller number of conversations would decide most outcomes. The delegation program that expands the set applies identity checks to participants, which improves accountability and simultaneously means the expansion is curated, not open, in practice. Each of those facts is defensible on its own terms. Together they describe a network whose decentralization is best characterized as a managed trajectory: real, measurable, improving, and still a long way from the property its marketing language implies.

The regulator arrives

Which is where the argument stopped being philosophical. On June 26, Singapore’s Monetary Authority added Hyperliquid to its Investor Alert List, the register of entities that consumers might wrongly believe are licensed. The listing is not a ban, not an enforcement action, and not a finding of wrongdoing, and Hyperliquid’s response was accurate on every point: it has never claimed authorization from the regulator, nothing about the network changed, users retain self-custody, and settlement remains on-chain. Bybit had joined the same list nine days earlier, KuCoin in February, Binance since 2021, which places Hyperliquid in familiar company and suggests a regulator working through a list instead of singling out a protocol.