After Bitmex, now Bitmart has also gone under. Yet another deep bear market signal confirmed. After all, most CEX businesses are relatively overlapping, and their lifeline relies heavily on continuous altcoin issuance and speculation. As VCs go bankrupt and the altcoin narrative gradually collapses, trading volumes have shrunk drastically, and small CEXs are seeing their revenues plummet. The larger and mid-sized CEXs that reacted quickly have pivoted to the U.S. stock market to extend their lifeline. For smaller CEXs to do the same, they not only need to invest more capital to build the infrastructure but also ensure compliance and face even fiercer competition in a more homogenized market. After all, the right to issue stocks doesn’t lie within the crypto space, and everyone is trading the same assets. So why not just go to a safer, larger platform? What’s scarier than the sharp drop in short-term revenue is the lack of hope and no clear way to break the deadlock. Instead of downsizing and struggling to survive, only to starve slowly, it might be better to just cut losses quickly and surrender. On top of that, on-chain trading volumes and user experiences are improving, with lower compliance costs and risks. In the future, customers are likely to flock to larger platforms and on-chain solutions, forming a barbell-shaped market structure. This trend seems inevitable. The exit of small CEXs from the stage of history is probably just a matter of time.