9 Crypto Exchanges that were shut down or had to shut down

The life of cryptocurrencies and the crypto exchange platforms is like a roller coaster ride that is full of ups and downs. Some see massive growth and numbers while others see a downfall in their stats.

Sometimes these falls are so deep and hard that it becomes hard for them to recover from the downfall, and eventually, they have to close their shops and move on in life.

In some cases, the governments are not supportive of this digital advancement of the world, and they see these exchanges and cryptocurrencies as threats. This leads to hard steps that the governments take, which results in the uprooting of businesses.

Here are 9 crypto exchanges from the world that had to face a hard fall and shut their shops:

1. Mt. Gox

Founded in 2010, Mt. Gox was a Tokyo based bitcoin exchange that was doing well in the field of crypto exchange. By the year 2013-2014, it was taking care of 70% of the trade that was taking place in the world.

Mt. Gox was doing great, but at the beginning of 2014, things were not going well for them, and they filed bankruptcy protection as they had liabilities of almost $65 million. And things got worse when about 750,000 of its customer’s bitcoins got lost blaming hackers caused the damage. With the value of around $473 million, the lost bitcoins caused a lot of problems for the company, and eventually, they had to shut down their operations, and the company began investigating the matter.

Around 200,000 bitcoins were found in 2015, but even that couldn’t help them get back in business. In May 2016, creditors of Mt. Gox mentioned that they lost $2.4 trillion when Mt. Gox went bankrupt.

2. Koinex

With more than a million users, $3 billion in trading volume and over 20 million trade orders, Koinex was one of the leading cryptocurrency exchange platforms from India. It was founded by Rakesh Yadav, Rahul Raj, and Aditya Malik in the year 2017.

But their trading didn’t last long because of the ruling by the Indian Government of banning the usage of cryptocurrency in India. This lead to Koinex shutting their operations in the country along with giving back the money to users that they had by means.

It was the safest and fastest-growing trading platform from the country with the records of 40,000 users signing up within 24 hours and a trading volume of $265 million.

3. Quadrigacx

Quadrigacx was considered one of the largest Canadian crypto trading platform that had a massive user base and was founded in the year 2013 by Gerald Cotten and Michael Patryn. The trade was going well for the company, but things took an ugly turn when Cotten passed away under unfortunate circumstances.

With his death, there were several issues that came to light, first being how the company had filed for creditors protection since they were not able to trace a few information and get control of the bitcoins. This problem happened because all the data was stored in cold wallets which only Gerald knew the password to.

The company owed around $163 million to the users and its investors, but the investigators were only able to recover $33 million. They are still trying to find ways to get ahold of the cold wallets. Due to all these issues, they had to shut down their working.

4. Zebpay

Another crypto exchange venture that became a victim of the Indian Government’s strict rules and regulations was Zebpay. Zebpay had its headquarters located in Singapore.

Founded by Sandeep Goenka, Saurabh Agrawal, and Mahin Gupta, Zebpay was an app-based trading platform that helps its users to maintain their portfolio and invest in various cryptocurrencies using just one single application. On 28th September 2018, Zebpay informed it’s users that all the crypto-to-crypto transactions will be canceled and no new orders will be taken as they are shutting down the procedures. They further added that the tokens and coins would be reimbursed in the users Zebpay wallet.

When it was up and running, Zebpay had a user base of approximately 50,000-60,000 users, and every month 5,000 users used to join the network to take advantage of their services.

5. Bitmarket

BitMarket was one of the largest cryptocurrency exchange trading platform in Poland, but unfortunately, they had to shut it down when they faced liquidity loss. On 8th July they decided to shut down their operations, but the users were still able to trade because they had asked them to change their passwords as well as the API keys.

With a trading volume of around $850,000 every day, Bitmarket was the second-largest platform cryptocurrency exchange in Poland. Bitmarket disabled a few large withdrawals to avoid any scams and requested the users to comply with KYC measures.

6. Cryptokart

Another Indian crypto exchange platform is facing a hard time because of government regulations. Founded in the year 2017, Cryptokart has recently decided to shut their operations because of the issues and troubles they are facing during trading.

The founder, Gaurang Poddar, is a graduate from Carnegie Mellon University, and he worked as a general manager at NODD App before starting his own company, but unfortunately, this didn’t last long. This shutdown shows the difficulty faced by the startups in India and how dark the future of cryptocurrency is in India.

7. Coinome

Coinome was a venture by Mumbai based payment gateway Billdesk which was launched in 2017. Coinome became the first crypto exchange platform from India with support of 20 cryptocurrencies.

But recently in May, they had announced the closing of their services because of the regulatory difficulties that such crypto exchange startups are facing. They notified their customers with a tweet and suggested them to withdraw all their investments.

8. Coindelta

Crypto exchange platforms are facing issues, and Coindelta is one of them. After 18 months of being available for use, Coindelta had asked the users to withdraw their crypto assets as they had to shut down their services because of strict government regulations and no support from the institution.

Even though the trading service was terminated, they provided the support service for another month so that users can withdraw their investments. All the outstanding offers were canceled, and the funds were added back to the user wallets.

9. Coinnest

Being in the list of top 10 exchanges in South Korea, Coinnest was doing well as compared to its competitors. Founded in 2017 and owned by Incublock Co. Ltd., Coinnest was a trading platform for the domestic market of China and South Korea as well as international traders.

Facing a series of scams and troubling events, Coinnest was shuttered down. Its co-founder, Kim II-hwan, was arrested in 2018 for the charges of embezzlement. Later that year, the officials were accused of taking a bribe for the unfair listing of S Coin digital token. In April 2019, Coinnest went offline, and all the trading service came to an end.

The world is divided into two parts where some support the cryptocurrencies and crypto exchange platforms, whereas the other half is totally against them. But what is unfortunate is how this fight is causing damage to some good talent, great ideas, and their implementation, and how they get wasted because of these regulations and unfortunate events.

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