Bitcoin Posts 26% August Gain as BitMEX Shuts Down — SkimNews
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- Bitcoin posted its best August in years with a 26% return, while Ethereum gained 34%, and President Trump endorsed a decentralized perpetual futures venue at the White House.
- BitMEX, one of crypto's first futures exchanges and the inventor of the perpetual swap and 100x leverage, is shutting down after 11 years in September.
- Former Stephan Lutz said BitMEX was "a victim of its own success" — every legitimate exchange now uses the perpetual swap and funding mechanism his team pioneered.
- Roughly 19% of American adults have invested in, traded, or used crypto per Pew Research, yet the explosion of networks, wallets, exchanges, and bridges has made the market harder to navigate, not easier.
- MiCA is live in the EU while the CLARITY Act may eventually pass in the US, marking crypto's shift from regulatory headache to a regulated industry — more legitimate but duller.
- Self-custody has become paradoxical: the more valuable Bitcoin gets, the more dangerous holding private keys becomes, whether from physical wrench attacks or AI exploits.
- Long Island Iced Tea Corp renamed itself Long Blockchain Corp in December 2017, saw its stock surge 500%, and was delisted two months later for misleading the market — a relic of crypto's wild early era.
Why it matters: The 26% August rally signals crypto's infrastructure — stablecoins, DeFi settlement, tokenization — is now irreversible within traditional finance. But that success means the industry's original promises (sovereign money, borderless payments, frictionless self-custody) have been absorbed rather than fulfilled, and pioneers like BitMEX won't be the ones reaping the rewards.
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