What to use instead of the BitMEX API

The product

BitMEX was a crypto derivatives exchange, and its API mattered more than its screen. In May 2016 it listed XBTUSD, the perpetual swap the closure notice calls BitMEX's invention: an inverse contract quoted in dollars and settled in bitcoin, with funding every eight hours. Its instrument endpoint still described it that way in September 2025. Margin and P&L were counted in satoshis, under the ticker XBt. For years XBTUSD's funding rate and open interest were the derivatives numbers people quoted. A REST API and a WebSocket feed sat underneath, BitMEX was among the founding venues of tick archives such as Tardis.dev, and bots and terminals treated it as a standard connection.

The end came in two notices, both on the vendor's own blog. On 23 July 2026 HDR Global Trading, the operator, announced:

Today we are announcing the closure of the BitMEX Exchange, which will take effect on 23 September 2026 at UTC 04:00:00 (the Closure Time).

New registrations stopped that day. From 26 August at 04:00 UTC, risk limits allowed positions only to be reduced, and BitMEX said it would force-close positions and early-settle illiquid contracts before the Closure Time. XBTUSD itself was delisted and settled early, at 12:00 UTC on 16 September. On 23 September BitMEX posted that it "has ceased all exchange operations". Login and withdrawals remain. Neither closure notice mentions the API by name. With no trading and no new data, the public half has nothing left to serve, and the private half has nothing left to trade.

What to use instead

Nobody replaces BitMEX whole. What you held was one of three things: a live derivatives feed, a piece of order code, or a history. Each goes somewhere different.

If you read live funding, open interest and books, the Bybit API is the closest in shape. Its BTCUSD contract is an inverse perpetual settled in BTC, sized in dollars, with an eight-hour funding interval, all on keyless public endpoints. It refuses US and Mainland China IP addresses outright. The OKX API also lists coin-margined swaps (BTC-USD-SWAP and ETH-USD-SWAP) beside its USDT ones, and serves funding history and open interest to an anonymous GET. Its terms reach public endpoints too, which matters if you republish anything.

If you had order code, CCXT is the shortest path if the code already went through it, since the unified methods are the same on the next venue. The contract sizes are not, so see the notes below. If you wrote to BitMEX's REST API directly, you are rewriting the client whichever venue you pick.

If what you needed was the history, it outlived the exchange. Tardis.dev lists BitMEX as delisted, with trades, L2 books, quotes, funding and liquidations from 30 March 2019. Amberdata has BitMEX funding from May 2016, the earliest start on its own funding table, and its changelog says history up to the closure stays available. Coin Metrics has the XBTUSD and ETHUSD trades up to the settlement, but only on a paid key: its free community tier refuses all market data.

The cross-venue view BitMEX used to be one row of is on how to get funding and open interest. The trade-offs between the large venue APIs are on Binance vs Coinbase vs Bybit vs OKX APIs.

What you give up

The benchmark series. XBTUSD funding ran from 2016 to 2026 on one contract under one set of rules. Any series you build from now on joins it to another venue's contract, with a different index, different funding caps and a different crowd. A backtest that crosses September 2026 is crossing a regime change, whether or not the chart shows a seam.

The quanto. ETHUSD was a quanto contract: priced in dollars, margined and settled in bitcoin. The coin-margined ETH contracts on Bybit and OKX settle in ETH. A strategy that held ETH exposure on BTC collateral has no equivalent on this page.

One API for data and orders. The BitMEX API served public market data and private order entry from one host. The Bybit and OKX cards here cover only the public market-data half. Their private APIs need an account at the exchange, which this catalogue does not evaluate.

A clean end to the series. XBTUSD did not trade to the Closure Time. BitMEX's notices of 2 and 4 September set it to reduce-only at 04:00 UTC on 10 September, stopped funding at 04:00 on 16 September and delisted and settled it at 12:00 that day, and a notice on the 16th confirmed it. Coin Metrics' trades stop at that minute and Tardis's XBTUSD files end with that day. The last six days are a reduce-only wind-down and the last price is an index settlement, not a market close, so a backtest that runs to the end of the series is reading the wind-down.

Migration notes

XBT is BTC. BitMEX used the ticker XBT and counted balances in satoshis (XBt). Every pick says BTC and counts in whole coins or in dollars. A symbol map and a units conversion belong in the first commit, not the last. How to map a ticker to one coin covers the general problem.

Contract size changes the arithmetic, quietly. XBTUSD was one dollar per contract, traded in lots of 100. Bybit's BTCUSD is also one dollar per contract, with a step of one. OKX's BTC-USD-SWAP is 100 dollars per contract, and its ETH-USD-SWAP is ten. An order quantity carried over unchanged is a position a hundred times too large or too small, and CCXT does not convert it for you.

Pin nothing to the old hosts. Code pointed at the BitMEX REST or WebSocket host no longer gets market data, and the vendor gave no API end date to plan around. Our request to its REST path on 25 October 2026 got a 403, which may be a geographic block rather than a switch-off, so we cannot tell you what the host answers from elsewhere. Treat any client still configured for it as dead code.

Your own trade history is a withdrawal problem, not an API problem. The closure notice says logged-in users can still see their wallet balance and transaction history. Export it while the login works. How to export exchange trade history covers the formats, and what happens to data after a delisting covers why nobody else will keep your fills for you.

Revoke the keys anyway. Withdrawals still run, so a BitMEX key that had withdrawal rights is still worth something to whoever holds it. Delete it in the account settings, and read what your API key lets a bot do before you issue the replacement elsewhere.