We opened an account, checked the fee schedule and traded on Phemex's futures desk to see whether the exchange rebuilt trust after January 2025's hot wallet breach, and whether its 0.01% maker fee is worth the residual risk.
Phemex opened in 2019 promising cheaper futures trading than the big three, and on paper it still delivers that. Our test account confirmed a 0.01% maker fee, the lowest of any exchange we have put money into. Then, on January 23, 2025, an attacker drained close to 73 million dollars from the exchange's hot wallets across sixteen blockchains. We wanted to know if the fee advantage still matters once that history sits next to the account.
What the breach actually did
Phemex's own incident timeline says the hot wallet anomaly began at 11:30 UTC on January 23, 2025. Deposits and withdrawals stopped within the hour. Independent trackers, including Halborn and Bleeping Computer, put the loss between 37 and 85 million dollars, with 73 million as the figure most outlets converged on after tracing more than 125 transactions across Ethereum, BSC, Polygon, Optimism, Base and Arbitrum. Phemex's public statement said cold wallets, and therefore the bulk of customer funds, were untouched, and staged withdrawals back online between January 24 and 26.
What the announcement does not contain is a number. Phemex never published a loss figure of its own, nor a compensation schedule for anyone whose hot-wallet balance was mid-withdrawal that week. It pointed instead to its reserve position. We checked that reserve page ourselves.
