Recent major movements are signaling a changing of the guard in the crypto market. BitMEX, which pioneered the early crypto derivatives market by inventing the perpetual swap in 2014, has announced it will shut down and fade into history on September 23rd. Conversely, South Korea's Mirae Asset Group has acquired Korbit, rebranded it to 'Digital X,' and declared its transition into a fully institutional business centered on regulatory compliance and Real World Asset (RWA) tokenization.

As the era of offshore, unregulated exchanges draws to a close, the DeFi ecosystem is suffering from a series of bridge hacks. Recently, security incidents involving over $35 million in fund outflows occurred in just one day across AFX Trade, VerusCoin, and BSquared Network. Interestingly, despite this, U.S. Bitcoin and Ethereum spot ETFs have seen continuous inflows of institutional capital for several days, showing remarkable resilience.

It feels like a massive structural shift is underway as market liquidity safely migrates away from risky traditional DeFi infrastructure toward fully regulated financial products. Just as BitMEX’s final exit symbolizes, the heart of the market seems to be shifting entirely toward institutional frameworks and regulatory compliance. It’s worth keeping a close eye on the growth rate of institutional-grade permissioned liquidity pools and the Security Token Offering (STO) market moving forward. 😄

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