BitMEX Balance Four Days Before the Block: Four Futures Contracts Run Past the Closure Date

On the morning of August 22, 2026 around 108,146 bitcoin in open value still sat on BitMEX. Four days later the exchange blocks the opening of new positions, and four weeks after that it ends trading altogether. cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on August 22, 2026 by reading the exchange's public data interface rather than its announcements.

The course of the wind-down itself is known and described in our report from the day of the announcement: BitMEX is shutting down operations explains the dates, the reduce-only mode from August 26, the forced closure, the account fee after the closing date and the release of staked BMEX tokens. This text does not repeat any of it. It answers a different question: what is actually still sitting there, and what happens to the contracts that reach beyond the closing date?

What This Analysis Measures: Method, Scope and Timing of the Survey

The public programming interface of BitMEX was called on August 22, 2026 at around 06:57 UTC at the endpoint for active instruments (HTTP 200). The fields evaluated were those reported by the interface for state, open value, open interest, expiry date and 24-hour turnover. A total of 39 instruments were examined, meaning the complete set the interface lists as active.