CoinEx Founder Haipo Yang: Refuses to Sell the Platform to Maintain Trust
CoinEx founder Haipo Yang issued a public statement regarding the imminent shutdown of the platform, explaining the deeper reasons for ceasing operations directly as the founder.
He stated that after careful consideration, he accepted the "harsh reality"—CoinEx has failed to grow into one of the industry-leading exchanges, and the security and compliance risks associated with operating a crypto exchange have become increasingly difficult to control. This is the first time he has acknowledged the platform's lagging position in industry competition in such direct terms.
The core decision logic he provided is that "revenue can decline, but responsibility cannot," and he clearly stated that "taking on unlimited risks for limited revenue is no longer a rational choice"—this statement characterizes the shutdown as a proactive reassessment of risk and reward, rather than a passive exit due to issues with the capital chain or liquidity.
Yang revealed that he had seriously considered selling CoinEx, indicating that shutting down was not the only option; cashing out through a sale could have been another path, but he ultimately decided against selling.
His reasoning is that users entrust their assets to the platform based on their trust in the platform and in him personally, and transferring the platform and this trust to a new owner is not the right way to end this journey—in other words, he views user trust as an asset that is personally bound to the founder and non-transferable, rather than a resource that can be sold along with the exchange's equity.
Mechanically, the decision to "not sell" directly excludes a category of potential counterparties—namely, potential buyers who might acquire CoinEx's license, user base, and brand. Such mergers and acquisitions are not uncommon in the crypto industry, where buyers typically value an existing user base and compliant license assets. By abandoning this monetization path, Yang effectively closed off his opportunity as a founder to gain acquisition premiums from an exit, opting instead for a more costly but directly controllable liquidation method for user asset disposal. The beneficiaries are the existing users who choose to stay on the platform, waiting for the repurchase of CET at the initial listing price of 0.005 USDT and the asset processing during the withdrawal window on December 22—under the liquidation path, asset disposal rules will be executed by the original team as promised; under a sale path, there would be uncertainty regarding whether the new owner would continue the original commitments.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Yang's choice to "actively shut down rather than sell" is not an isolated decision—the more common exit strategy in the crypto industry is acquisition and integration, and by publicly abandoning this more easily monetizable path, he somewhat echoes his earlier positioning of CoinEx as an "in-built contract exchange," emphasizing product and user relationship autonomy.
From a capital disposal perspective, selling involves packaging "user trust" and "compliance licenses" to sell to the next party, which typically provides founders with a one-time cash-out benefit; whereas the liquidation path chosen by Yang directly returns assets to users according to promised rules, with the founder not obtaining additional acquisition compensation from this exit—this means he prioritizes the certainty of user asset disposal over his potential exit gains.
Cases of "founders refusing to sell and choosing self-liquidation" are rare in the crypto industry; the more common model is for teams to sell to larger exchange platforms for integration. Yang's choice distinguishes CoinEx from the typical "selling to survive" exit model, representing one of the few examples of choosing "self-termination" rather than "being acquired and absorbed" during the current industry clearing cycle.
Structurally, this is essentially a "fork" in the path of capital concentration under regulatory pressure: rising compliance costs should push small and medium exchanges to either be acquired and integrated by leading platforms or exit the market directly. Yang's choice indicates that when founders view "user trust" as a non-transferable personal asset, the acquisition path will be actively abandoned—such decisions will cause users and liquidity that should have flowed to leading platforms through acquisition to instead disappear directly from the industry, rather than being absorbed through existing integrations.
ABAB News · Law of Cognition
- What can be sold is the license; what cannot be sold is trust.
- Revenue can be negotiated; responsibility has no discount.
- Proactive liquidation is the last receipt the founder gives himself.