September Twelfth: The Day CoinEx Almost Died
CoinEx's risk control system blared its alarm early Tuesday morning in September 2023. Someone was emptying hot wallets in weird patterns. By hours later, around $70 million worth of cryptocurrency had been siphoned from the exchange. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT watched as coins started hitting addresses associated with the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group, which had just pulled off a $41 million theft from crypto gambling platform Stake days prior. If a coinex review had existed at the time, it would've sounded like a eulogy. It was precisely the type of hack that would have sounded the death bells for other exchanges. The decision to take the loss and rebuild from the ground up is a tale of operational fortitude that continues to shape the exchange to this day, almost three years later.
If you're about to Google "what is coinex" save the search. CoinEx is a cryptocurrency exchange that was originally founded in Hong Kong in 2017. It was started by Yang Haipo, the founder of mining pool ViaBTC. By 2023, CoinEx reported users from 200 countries and served millions of users. The exchange boasted support for hundreds of trading pairs and is home to its own native asset CoinEx Token (CET). CET functioned as gas on CoinEx Smart Chain at the time and could be staked to receive a reduction in trading fees. The hack jeopardized all of the above.
How Seventy Million Disappeared Through Compromised Hot Wallet Keys
The attack anatomy was simple. Private keys belonging to hot wallets used by exchanges to process withdrawals were stolen. PeckShield initially pegged total losses at around $31 million ($19 million ETH, $11.5 million TRON and $295,000 MATIC). CertiK Alert's larger analysis posted the figure at $53 million. CoinEx later confirmed the haul was "closer to 70 million". Sitting between those two ranges is difficult for analysts because of the accounting ambiguity multi-chain heists produce. Funds were taken from Ethereum, Tron and Polygon concurrently. As it was happening those funds moved through intermediary wallets that obfuscated the trail. Attributing the attack to Lazarus Group was easy. Attackers had repurposed much of the hack's underlying infrastructure from the Stake attack. Hackers operational security was lacking. There was a smoking gun.
CoinEx paused deposits and withdrawals, then briefed the media: "Users' assets are safe and not touched". CoinEx would fully reimburse customers, promising 100% loss coverage. That promise, made hours after the attack commenced would become a slogan for the recovery. CoinEx said the $70 million was "a small percentage of its total assets under management". That may or may not have been true at the time. Users had no way of knowing one way or another. (They can now.) Making good on that promise without issuing new CET or devaluing the ones that existed came with significant cost. It meant absorbing the loss on the exchange's balance sheet.
Making Users Whole Without Touching The CET Token Supply
Most exchanges that we've interacted with following hacks have used one of two approaches. Share the loss with your users (Bitfinex's approach following their hack in 2016 when they issued hacked-bitcoin-burning-BFX tokens that were haircuts), or print new tokens to backfill the shortfall. CoinEx did neither. Instead, CoinEx chose to fund the reimbursements using operating capital. The company never increased the circulating supply of CoinEx Token token beyond its 10 billion total supply. Nor did CoinEx pause the token's existing burn mechanism (20% of CET daily trading fee revenue is allocated monthly to repurchasing and burning CET). CET holders appreciated this. Diluting the supply would've tanked an already-traumatized cet price. By absorbing the loss, CoinEx allowed its native tokenomics to continue coursing through the deflationary protocol that CET is built on.
The withdrawal queues slowly began to trickle out over the following weeks. CoinEx began working on re-enabling coinex wallet functionality chain-by-chain, starting with bigger coins such as BTC and ETH, and funneling down to the exchange's smaller coins. This process frustrated certain customers who wanted to immediately withdraw their coins, but it also allowed the exchange's security team to triple and quadruple-check each chain's wallet infrastructure before opening the floodgates. Fast forward nine months and CoinEx had reopened all channels, distributed reimbursement packages to affected users, and begun publishing proof-of-reserve data. Speaking of which... that last thing mentioned above is likely the biggest long-term change to the exchange following the hack. CoinEx publishes proof-of-reserves data on a monthly basis. They last updated this information in January and February 2026. Proof-of-reserves doesn't prove that an exchange is actually solvent (it only accounts for assets held, not liabilities owed), but for an exchange trying to regain its customers' trust after losing $70 million it's a good start.
A Security Overhaul Built On Paranoia
The real problem with how the breach went down originally is that CoinEx stored way too much value in always-online hot wallets. They've improved this since the breach by hardening security directly: Cold storage holds the majority of value now. Separately, the hot wallet infrastructure has also been broken out into multiple accounts such that no one wallet on the exchange holds more value than is necessary to service short-term withdrawals. CoinEx says it has already done 25 major product upgrades in 2024 alone. CoinEx's major updates have been overwhelmingly in the category of, or related to security: improving withdrawal monitoring, anomaly detection, introducing new trading tools like CoinEx Swap and a native AMM, introducing staking and mining tools which, even geared toward generating revenue for the exchange, also reduce the on-hand assets in hot wallets by incentivizing users to lockup funds in secure, controlled environments.
Throughout 2025, there's been a pivot you could notice in the coinex news cycle. Where previously every article about the exchange was regarding another breach report, CoinEx began showing up in articles for events like TOKEN2049, Coinfest Asia, LABITCONF, Singapore Tech Innovation Expo, etc. CoinEx co-hosted a side event with Kronos Research and ViaBTC at Consensus Hong Kong 2026. The exchange was sponsored by Babylon Labs there. Most recently, CoinEx hosted "RISING TIDE: High-Signal Night" at Hong Kong Web3 Festival 2026. Their strategy with this reactive visibility seems to be to rebrand as an industry progressive instead of a breach-targeted exchange. One data point that makes this uncomfortable though is CoinGecko's metric for CET's security score. As of April 2026, CoinGecko has CoinEx's security score at 18%. This stat includes many metrics besides exchange security specifically (code audits, team transparency, liquidity, etc.) but it's one that no coinex review can sweep up. That low of a score is reflective of both reputational damage incurred in 2023 and the low volume of the token itself.
Platform Metrics Today: Recovery With Asterisks
Operationally, things are looking quite rosy. CoinEx boasts over 10 million users, features over 1,100 coins and monthly releases proof-of-reserve data. The CoinEx Token ecosystem is live on all three chains; DEX Chain (trading functions), Smart Chain (smart contracts) and Privacy Chain (privacy transactions). CET itself acts as each chain's gas token.
The price performance of CET is a different story. CoinEx Token is trading today at approximately $0.0287. That's down ~81% from ATH levels of $0.1503. Even on a 1 week scale CoinEx Token has underperformed crypto overall which gained 1.5% and 'Other Smart Contract Platforms' tokens which gained 4.2% during this time period. Average daily volume for CET currently sits at an extremely low $45,000. Volume that would more logically match a token with 4-figure user count instead of an exchange with user counts in the 8-figures. Technicals from Bitget show strong sell signals in the four-hour, daily and weekly timeframes. Finally, there have been 2 unique addresses tweeting actively about CoinEx Token over the last 24 hours across our monitored social networks. These tweets have had a neutral sentiment score of 0.0 / 5.0. CoinEx Token currently ranks #702 on CoinMarketCap and #375 on CoinGecko (CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap rankings can vary as CG uses market cap vs CMC fully diluted valuations).
CoinEx claims the exchange has recovered however looking at the price action and trading volume of the coin itself it's hard to argue that. There is a burn mechanism in place that will burn the original 10 billion supply down to the current 2.5 billion circulating supply. However, with demand this low the deflationary aspect of the project by itself will not stimulate a price increase. We've seen this with coins connected to other platforms such as storj price or frax share price. Even ecosystem coins with far less utility like yfi credits group crypto have seen greater dips in demand.
The Founder's Confession Complicates The Narrative
CoinEx is a cryptocurrency exchange. CET is the native cryptocurrency of CoinEx. It wouldn't be crazy to assume CoinEx was mostly created by a single individual: Yang Haipo. Two days before CoinEx published this essay, Yang authored an argument for why bitcoin's trillion dollar market capitalization will soon implode. Yang calculated that there's $200 billion of total stock of usable liquidity in the market. $60-$80 billion worth of crypto is burned per year. "Without a significant new influx of outside capital" into the market, Yang wrote, we have two and a half to three years before "something breaks badly."
To say the least, it is extremely uncommon for the founder of both an exchange, and its corresponding native token to be this negative. Yang has built a reputation, through CoinEx's internal economics as well as his interviews being on-brand, as someone that cares more about product than hype. In an interview back in March of 2025 he said: "We're being guided by the needs of our users rather than hopping on every trendy bandwagon, and we're investing more into improving the ecosystem than we are into advertising." Yang's April 2026 essay was the polar opposite of laid back pragmatism. The tone of the article seemed like he had a moment of existential dread over crypto's financial fundamentals. So, does Yang's doom speech ruin the recovery thesis? Alone, no. CoinEx can remain a useful company that serves users despite what the founder thinks about the macro economy. Coinex wallet service is up and running. Proof-of-reserves are publicly available. The burn mechanism already exists. But the article does conjure up one curiosity: if the founder can't get behind the financial thesis of crypto itself, what's the long term value of investing into his platform?
What CoinEx's Survival Proves
This is not a bullish case for CoinEx's post-hack 2.0 thesis. Truth is truth and an objective CoinEx Review can't really paint that bullish of a picture when current security score is at 18%, 24H volume across CET is sitting at under $50K, and there's a large sell signal across all timeframes. Truthfully the token has underperformed across every metric.
However on the other side of that coin... this exchange has given us tangible evidence that they've orchestrated one of the cleanest exchange post-hack recoveries in exchanges' history. They took a $70 million haircut, didn't socialize that loss with users, didn't dilute CET. They re-architected their security stack, instituted proof-of-reserves, and had 100% of their services up in 9 months. CoinEx doubled down on their growth, plan continues towards building out global expansion through 2025 and into 2026. CoinEx continues to build for the tens of millions who use its service to do what CoinEx was built to do: trade. Trade 1,100+ assets. There's such a large disconnect between recovery on the operational side of the exchange and what the market is telling us. Right now price and volume of CET is telling us to sell. Recovering from a hack is one thing. Thriving post hack is a completely different thing. CoinEx has proven they can absorb $70 million and not only survive, but come out swinging on the operational side of things. The question now is if they can convert that and shift momentum back towards growth with the founder of CoinEx now publicly questioning crypto's very future. What the coming months of coinex news will have to tell.
