The China-based Cryptocurrency exchange CoinEx announced that it will exist from the Chinese market and no longer provide services for users in Mainland China after over a year of operation within the territory.

The announcement on its website released on March 11 reads that the exchange chose to terminate services in Mainland China as compliance with China’s regulations and regulatory requirements of central authority. Users within the territory are required to withdraw their crypto assets before March 29 (UTC).

CoinEx was launched by one of bitcoin’s largest mining pools ViaBTC in December 2017. With its operator a strong supporter of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), the exchange rose as a platform providing only BCH-priced trading pairs in its early days.

The exchange seems to mainly focus on Southeast Asia market with language support including English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian and Russian. According to its official website, CoinEx is providing global trading services in nearly 100 countries/regions.

The decision of the exchange, occurred at a special timing when the country’s biggest political event is ongoing and Consumer Rights Day is around the corner, raised concerns from some cautious Chinese crypto investors. Some worry that the crackdown on crypto trading offered by exchanges may be escalated again in the country.

While prior to it, some smaller exchanges including Italian-based BitGrail and Ukraine-based Liquid have shut down in early 2019. With reduced liquidity on these small exchanges, traders are abandoning them for bigger ones. Smaller exchanges such as CoinEx, barely making enough to keep afloat, have to terminate their services or cut off dead branches in a sluggish market.

But what worries users more is that the exchange makes no statement about its future plan and markets outside Mainland China. Some alert that it is a signal that the exchange may not exist in near future.

Coinex fucking never answer questions. You just cant say we will be no longer in chine market. What will happen in future you have to explain that too. You just cheat on all of users who trust #coinex market. I think #CoinEx wont be exist in near future — nuri (@nurisoylemez) March 11, 2019

As of press time, the exchange is ranked 118th among global crypto exchanges by trading volume, in the last 24 hours it has seen over $1,000,000 in trading executed.