Opinion: The successive closures of BitMEX and BitMart reflect a trend towards compliance in the highly competitive CEX sector, indicating a proactive reshuffle.

BlockBeats News, July 26th — Regarding the successive closures of BitMEX and BitMart, crypto researcher Haotian expressed the view that this is not just a simple "exchange collapse" brewing during a bull market, but rather proactive consolidation driven by intense competition among centralized exchanges (CEX) under the compliance trend.

Haotian pointed out that the focus of CEX competition has shifted to licensing, reserve proof, KYC/AML, and other compliance requirements. At the same time, exchanges are actively expanding into tokenization of traditional finance (TradFi) assets to explore new revenue sources. However, this also means that the pricing power of traditional crypto exchanges is gradually diminishing.

“Small and medium-sized exchanges must find a differentiated positioning in order to survive. They either need to deeply cultivate specific regional licenses and provide localized services to take advantage of regulatory arbitrage, or focus on a specific niche product such as TradFi assets, Perps, RWAFi, etc., or fully embrace the innovation narrative native to crypto, including DeFi, Agentic Economy, MEMEs, leveraging the power of the crypto-native community to weather the cycles. No matter what, continuing homogenized competition will only accelerate the wave of eliminations. However, on the other hand, getting rid of some weak competitors is not necessarily a bad thing.”