USDT, SOL, ATOM and HYPE Products Enter Final Redemption Stage
Crypto exchange Phemex is winding down four of its On-Chain Earn products, giving customers until September 11 to request manual redemption while warning that some assets may take as long as 24 days to return to their exchange accounts.
The exchange is discontinuing On-Chain Earn products for USDT, Solana’s SOL, Cosmos’ ATOM and Hyperliquid’s HYPE. New subscriptions were closed on September 7, according to an announcement published by Phemex on September 8.
Phemex subsequently reminded customers of the approaching deadline through its official Telegram announcements channel. Any positions that users do not manually redeem by September 11 will be automatically redeemed by the exchange, meaning customers do not risk losing the assets simply by missing the deadline.
What makes the wind-down more notable is the difference in settlement periods.
Phemex says redeemed SOL will be credited to customers within seven days, HYPE within 10 days, USDT within 14 days and ATOM within 24 days. The same timelines will apply to positions automatically redeemed after the manual-redemption period closes.
The exchange said it is removing the products to “optimize” its product portfolio and concentrate resources on services offering greater long-term value. It did not cite liquidity problems, counterparty losses or problems with the underlying blockchain networks as reasons for the closures.
A closer look at Phemex’s On-Chain Earn structure helps explain why the four assets cannot necessarily be returned on the same timetable.
Phemex launched On-Chain Earn in September 2025 as a way for exchange customers to access staking and other on-chain yield strategies without operating external wallets themselves. Phemex handles the underlying protocol interactions while customers subscribe and redeem from inside their exchange accounts. From the beginning, the company told users that withdrawal times depended on the protocols involved.
A Phemex guide published in 2026 identifies two of the strategies now being discontinued. Its USDT On-Chain Earn strategy uses sUSDe from Ethena and listed a 14-day redemption period, while the SOL strategy used JitoSOL from Jito and already carried a seven-day redemption period.
That means those two settlement periods were characteristics disclosed for the products before the wind-down rather than new delays introduced specifically for their closure.
ATOM and HYPE were added to On-Chain Earn in January. At launch, Phemex advertised an estimated APY of as much as 15.72% for ATOM and 2.16% for HYPE, describing both as on-chain staking products generating blockchain-native rewards. Phemex warned that rewards and redemption could vary according to network conditions.
The ATOM timeline also closely tracks the underlying Cosmos Hub staking mechanism. Cosmos documentation says delegated ATOM normally enters a three-week, or 21-day, unbonding period after an undelegation request. Phemex’s maximum 24-day credit period therefore gives the platform roughly three additional days beyond the native network unbonding period for processing and crediting funds back to customer accounts.
A similar pattern appears with HYPE. Hyperliquid’s documentation says moving HYPE from a staking balance back to a spot balance involves an exact seven-day unstaking queue. Phemex is allowing up to 10 days for HYPE redemption, again providing an additional processing window beyond the underlying protocol requirement.
Phemex does not spell out that three-day difference in its discontinuation notice, so the precise source of the extra processing time has not been publicly explained.
The four closures are also not an isolated reduction in Phemex’s on-chain yield catalogue.
On August 24, the exchange announced that it was discontinuing its SolvBTC and xstETH On-Chain Earn products. Those products carried even longer settlement periods: up to three weeks for xstETH and one month for SolvBTC after redemption was initiated. Phemex used the same explanation about optimizing its product portfolio and concentrating resources on longer-term-value services.
Taken together, Phemex has recently moved to discontinue at least six On-Chain Earn products rather than only the four reaching their redemption deadline this week.
Its On-Chain Earn terms also make clear that assets being redeemed are not necessarily immediately liquid. Once a redemption instruction is submitted, customers cannot access the affected assets or continue earning returns while waiting for them to be released. Phemex says timing can depend on factors including token type and market activity.
For customers holding the latest four products, September 11 is therefore the last opportunity to initiate the process manually. Those who take no action will enter the same redemption process automatically after the deadline.
A 24-Day Redemption Sounds Worse Than the Mechanics Suggest
Twenty-four days is an unusually long time to wait for crypto held through an exchange product.
Read without context, that number could easily trigger the wrong conclusion. Long redemption periods have historically attracted attention when centralized crypto platforms have encountered liquidity problems.
There is currently no evidence in Phemex’s announcement that this is what is happening here.
The strongest evidence is in the differences between the assets themselves.
If Phemex were simply unable to produce customer assets, a uniform or open-ended withdrawal delay would be more worrying. Instead, it has published four specific timelines that broadly correspond with the mechanics of different underlying yield strategies.
ATOM is the clearest example. The Cosmos Hub itself makes users wait 21 days to complete ordinary staking withdrawals. A Phemex customer seeing a 24-day maximum is therefore not facing 24 days of unexplained exchange processing; most of that period can be accounted for by how native ATOM staking works.
HYPE tells a similar story. Hyperliquid imposes seven days before HYPE can move from its staking balance back to spot. Phemex’s 10-day timeframe looks consistent with that protocol delay plus an operational buffer.
USDT is more revealing in another way.
USDT itself does not require a 14-day blockchain unstaking period. But Phemex was not simply holding USDT in a wallet and paying interest from nowhere. Its published strategy routed the stablecoin exposure through Ethena’s sUSDe yield product, and Phemex had already quoted 14 days for redemption from that strategy.
That distinction is important when assessing centralized exchange “Earn” products.
The interface can make four balances look equally liquid. A user sees USDT, SOL, ATOM and HYPE sitting inside the same Phemex account and can subscribe with a few clicks. Underneath that interface, however, the assets may be deployed into completely different systems with completely different exit mechanics.
The wind-down exposes those differences.
There is still a transparency question worth pursuing. Phemex’s original product materials identify Ethena and Jito for its USDT and SOL strategies, but its September closure announcement does not tell customers where each pool is currently deployed, how much is invested in each strategy or give on-chain addresses through which the unwind can be independently followed.
Phemex’s terms also give the exchange broad discretion to delay redemptions when market conditions require it, including where liquidity in Phemex or the On-Chain Earn service is insufficient. That is a general contractual provision, however, and should not be treated as evidence that such a condition exists in this particular wind-down.
The more interesting signal may instead be the product pruning itself.
Phemex launched On-Chain Earn only a year ago as an expansion of its wealth-management offering. It has now announced the discontinuation of six strategies within several weeks, including SolvBTC, xstETH, USDT, SOL, ATOM and HYPE.
That raises a different set of questions: whether demand was too low, the products were operationally expensive, yields became less attractive, or Phemex simply wants to concentrate customer assets into fewer strategies.
For now, the long redemption windows are interesting enough to monitor, but they are not an insolvency signal on their own.
The better story is what those windows reveal: when a centralized exchange packages DeFi and staking into a one-click savings product, the liquidity still ultimately depends on whatever is happening underneath that button.
Shane Neagle is a financial markets analyst and digital assets journalist specializing in cryptocurrencies, memecoins, prediction markets, and blockchain-based financial systems. His work focuses on market structure, incentive design, liquidity dynamics, and how speculative behavior emerges across decentralized platforms.
He closely covers emerging crypto narratives, including memecoin ecosystems, on-chain activity, and the role of prediction markets in pricing political, economic, and technological outcomes. His analysis examines how capital flows, trader psychology, and platform design interact to create rapid market cycles across Web3 environments.
Alongside digital assets, Shane follows broader fintech and online trading developments, particularly where traditional financial infrastructure intersects with blockchain technology. His research-driven approach emphasizes understanding why markets behave the way they do, rather than short-term price movements, helping readers navigate fast-evolving crypto and speculative markets with clearer context.