BitMEX shut down on July 23 without a hack or a regulator's order behind it — just a "board decision," the exchange said. One day later, a lawsuit landed in the Southern District of New York telling a much less flattering version of the story.
Former customers BKX Services and David Namdar claim BitMEX ran a secret "Insider Trading Desk" for years, with access to every trader's positions and liquidation levels. According to the complaint, software identified which price move would wipe out the most customer positions, and the desk then traded to push the market there. The trades were allegedly hidden behind burner accounts with generic email addresses, and reference prices pulled from outside exchanges were supposedly nudged to trigger margin calls.
A separate claim centers on the March 13, 2020 outage — the infamous "Black Thursday" — when BitMEX's servers froze for 25 minutes during a market crash, wiping out roughly $800 million in customer positions. The lawsuit doesn't treat that as a technical glitch; it calls it part of the scheme.
Namdar is seeking the return of 316.9 BTC, BKX Services 305.8 BTC — about $40.7 million combined at current prices. But the suit is filed as a class action, meaning it technically covers anyone who traded BitMEX's bitcoin swaps from the US since July 2018, potentially tens of thousands of people.
BitMEX CEO Peter Wilkinson called the claims "spurious and opportunistic" with "no basis whatsoever," adding the company has fought off similar allegations before and expects to again. There's precedent for that confidence: a nearly identical suit was filed and dismissed without prejudice back in 2025 — and now the same allegations are back, with new detail attached.
