Bittrex

» see bittrex.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

bittrex was an american exchange for american customers. crypto in turkey ran through different rails. btcturk and paribu held most of the retail volume, binance global handled the rest. bittrex never showed up on my screens. it was the exchange that crypto-twitter americans logged into for the long-tail token listings that coinbase would not touch.

the three founders all came out of amazon's information-security org, with bill shihara as ceo and the other two on the engineering side. they launched bittrex in bellevue in february 2014. the founding pitch was straightforward: list more tokens than coinbase did, and run the security harder than coinbase did. for the 2017 bull run that worked extremely well, bittrex was a top-five us exchange by spot volume that year.

i was not anywhere near bittrex. turkish retail crypto users in 2017-2022 either used local exchanges or went straight to binance global. the us-only nature of bittrex was the part that mattered to its market. the deepest order books were on usd pairs. bittrex global launched later in liechtenstein specifically to serve non-us users but never got the same depth. when 3ac and ftx took the cycle down in 2022, bittrex was already losing share. by the time the sec sued in april 2023 the company had been wind-down-coded for at least a year.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cycle ~

the bittrex story for its first three years was the story of token listings. coinbase and gemini moved slowly. bittrex listed dozens of altcoins per quarter. for a 2017 retail trader who wanted exposure to anything outside btc and eth, bittrex was where you went. the volume curve through december 2017 mirrored the broader market: parabolic, with bittrex briefly cracking $1 billion daily volume in early january 2018.

the post-2018 contraction was hard but not fatal. bittrex maintained a steady mid-tier position through the 2019-2020 winter and rode the 2021 cycle without leveraged-position blowups of the kraken or ftx kind. the security record stayed clean. there was no public bittrex hack of any consequence, which inside crypto in 2018-2021 was already a meaningful resume entry. then 2022 happened to everyone.

~ how it ended ~

on march 31 2023 bittrex tweeted that it would wind down us operations effective april 30. the sec filed its complaint two weeks later on april 17, naming the exchange and shihara personally as a control person for unregistered-securities violations. the complaint specifically alleged that bittrex had been asking issuers to scrub language from public channels before listing, the kind of language that would tip regulators. bittrex inc filed chapter 11 in delaware on may 8 with assets and liabilities both in the $500m to $1 billion range, plus over 100,000 creditors.

the global arm in liechtenstein kept trading through summer and fall. settlement with the sec came in august, $24 million in disgorgement and penalties from bittrex inc and shihara jointly. on november 4 bittrex global announced a wind-down. trading stopped on december 4 2023. by mid-2024 customer funds had been returned to the majority of us creditors via the chapter 11 plan, though crypto withdrawals had been priced at march 2023 valuations, locking in a lot of the bear-market low.

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