Farewell BitMEX

Hong Kong-based BitMEX announced it's closing its doors on the 23rd of September of this year. I had the good fortune to know the founders and follow their journey from before they launched in December of 2014. It was amazing watching them go from an idea to a product launch and struggle through the process of finding product-market fit, before eventually rocketing to success. At one point they had daily trading volume regularly in excess of US$1 trillion.

Few will remember today, but BitMEX launched in the same year as the massive MtGox hack. In the shadow of that, they made it rule number 1 to not lose the customer's bitcoin. And they never did.

Unlike many of the VC-funded competitors who ran on a playbook of regulatory capture and state protection from day one, the BitMEX ran the business on their own terms and bowed-down to no one.

This eventually led to the Biden deep state going after the founders and the company, forcing them into a plea bargain for a made up crime in a place they didn't even do business. While they stayed out of jail, kept their money and the company, and even eventually had their names cleared by the Trump administration, I can only imagine the amount of stress they were under during this ordeal.

While the business never recovered, the respect the founders earned for doing things their own way, will live on forever. Yahtzee.