Bitget to End Services for Some Users, With Account-Specific Deadlines

Bitget operates as an offshore exchange registered in Seychelles, a structure many large platforms use to serve markets that US- and EU-licensed exchanges will not touch. Since 2022, Western sanctions packages tied to the war in Ukraine have pushed exchanges to progressively wall off Russia, Belarus and now increasingly Kazakhstan, following Binance's 2023 exit from the Russian market through a sale to CommEX. Bitget's terms already listed these three jurisdictions as prohibited, but the company is now acting on that clause rather than merely holding it on paper.

Users caught in the cutoff get individual deadlines rather than a blanket shutdown date, with one user reporting an October 21 cutoff, plus withdrawal instructions and account support to move funds out. Anyone in Russia, Belarus or Kazakhstan who fails to withdraw before their personal deadline risks losing practical access to their holdings even though Bitget says the funds themselves remain safe. Those affected will need to find a venue that still accepts their jurisdiction, likely a regional or peer-to-peer platform, while Bitget sheds a user base that exposed it to sanctions risk without having to fight individual account disputes.

A 'one-off exercise' that still results in blanket jurisdictional bans sits uneasily with the idea that crypto was built to move value without asking where the holder lives. Centralized exchanges like Bitget increasingly act as enforcement points for state sanctions regimes, deciding who can trade based on passport and residence rather than on-chain behavior, which is precisely the kind of gatekeeping the technology was meant to route around. That tension is not going away: as long as exchanges want banking relationships and fiat rails, they will keep absorbing the compliance burdens of the jurisdictions that host their counterparties.

The move was larger before the first headline than after. That is an observation, not an explanation: the market also moves on things nobody publishes.