On October 1st, 2020, the CFTC charged BitMEX owners with illegally operating a cryptocurrency derivatives trading platform. Further, the U.S. attorney for the district of New York indicted the owners for violating the Bank Secrecy Act.

Below, you’ll find a timeline of the history of BitMEX outlining the relevant issues in the recent charge brought by the CFTC as well as the generally increased focus on regulation in the space. The entire CFTC report can be found at the CFTC website here and this visual is only meant to summarize the key developments in chronological fashion. Each item in the timeline is hyperlinked to the page in the report it comes from or the relevant outside news article.

Key findings:

• The regulators base all action on the Relevant Period – defined as starting when BitMEX formed to its current operating date.

• The initial probe of BitMEX was announced mid-2019 and in the wake several things happened quickly: customers withdrew funds from BitMEX, BitMEX announced a new holding structure, and BitMEX parted ways with its then COO.

• BitMEX announced in August 2020 that it would require all customers to undergo KYC, nearly a year after the announcement of the probe.

• Two items appear to be the most fragrant: the lack of KYC in violation of the BSA (punctuated by open remarks by the founders chastising others for following KYC), and willful neglect (in some cases encouragement) to evade restrictions against U.S. users signing up on the platform – most notably in the form of encouraging the use of VPNs.