An exchange removes a coin
A delisting is an exchange dropping a coin from trading. It announces a day after which you can neither buy nor sell it there. Between the announcement and that day the market gets something it almost never has: a deadline.
- Spot
- Buying the coin itself, like at an exchange window: you paid, it is yours, you can withdraw it.
- Order book
- The list of every resting buy and sell order with its price. All trading happens inside it: your buy is filled against somebody's resting sell.
- Market maker
- A participant who keeps orders resting on both sides of the book so there is always someone to trade with. Usually the exchange pays them for it.
- Liquidity
- How much you can buy or sell without moving the price. Where it is thin, even a modest order moves the price by percent.
- Short
- A bet on a fall: you sell what you do not own, then buy it back lower. If the price rises instead, you lose.
- Venues polled
- 11
- Notices this month
- 4
- Nearest removal date
- in 6 days
Why it happens
Start with why exchanges do this at all. The reasons are dull: volume dried up and the listing costs more than it earns; the project is in trouble or abandoned; a regulator asked; sometimes the coin is simply moving to a new name. For our purposes the reason barely matters — what happens next is the same in every case.
Everyone holding the coin on that venue is now on a clock. It has to be sold before the date, or you are left with something you cannot do anything with. That is not advice or opinion, it is an obligation — which is why no piece of news creates this kind of pressure.
Meanwhile no buyers arrive. There is no reason to step into a coin that is about to be pulled. And the market maker — the one who normally keeps orders on both sides of the book — leaves first: they are paid to support trading, and trading is closing. What is left is a liquidation into a book everybody has walked away from, where each sale moves the price further than the one before it.
And the part most often underestimated: the coin may have no second home. If the real trading was here, after the date there is simply nowhere for it to continue. Sometimes it survives on small venues with a book a few thousand dollars deep — alive on paper, not in practice.
How people use it
- This is a scheduled event, not a surprise: the date is visible weeks ahead and can be prepared for calmly.
- The announcement and the date are two different moments. Pressure builds toward the second one, not the first.
- Plan the exit too: after the date the instrument may be gone, and "I'll hold a bit longer" becomes physically impossible.
- How far the coin already fell on the announcement tells you nothing about whether it falls further.
Where it breaks
Sometimes instead of a liquidation there is a violent move up: one venue drops the coin while others keep trading it, or somebody decides to buy up what is left at a discount. It is rare, but the move is occasionally larger than the entire fall before it. Anyone short with leverage finds out first.
What we track here
- Pulls the delisting and announcement feeds of the major exchanges on a short cycle, so a notice is picked up the hour it goes out.
- Holds a countdown to every removal date, because the pressure builds toward the date and not toward the announcement.
- Checks whether the coin still trades anywhere else and how deep that book is — that is what decides whether holding past the date is even possible.
- Watches the risk tag exchanges attach to shaky coins, which usually appears weeks before a removal notice does.
- You get the date the day it is published instead of the day it shows up in your feed.
- You know in advance whether an exit exists after the date, or whether the position gets settled for you at a price you did not choose.
- If you hold the coin as a long-term bag, the tag is your cue to move it while withdrawals still work.