UK advertising watchdog ruled BitMEX’s bitcoin promotion misleading

The U.K. Advertising Standards Authority upheld complaints against a BitMEX bitcoin advertisement on August 14, 2019, finding that the national-newspaper promotion misleadingly exaggerated investment returns and failed to illustrate risk. The ruling prohibited the advertisement from appearing again in its existing form and instructed BitMEX operator HDR Global Trading Ltd to present financial information intelligibly and signpost investment risks clearly.

The decision mattered beyond one newspaper campaign. It established that a cryptocurrency company could not escape advertising standards merely by presenting promotional material as a celebration of Bitcoin rather than an offer to buy a specific product. It also put the interpretation of long-term price charts—especially logarithmic charts—inside a consumer-protection framework.

A birthday advertisement became a financial promotion

The advertisement appeared on January 3, 2019, marking ten years since Bitcoin’s genesis block. It included a graph spanning January 2009 through January 2019, with the vertical axis labeled “Bitcoin Price In US Dollars” and values running from $0.0001 to $100,000. Accompanying material referred to Bitcoin’s anniversary and included an article by HDR Global co-founder and chief executive Arthur Hayes.

Four people complained that the advertisement exaggerated the return on a bitcoin investment; two of those complainants also argued that it failed to illustrate the investment’s risk. The ASA considered both objections under the U.K. Code of Non-broadcast Advertising and Direct & Promotional Marketing.

BitMEX responded that the campaign commemorated a technological milestone and was intended to inform rather than sell. The company described itself as a peer-to-peer market for bitcoin-settled derivatives, not a venue where customers exchanged fiat currency directly for bitcoin. It also argued that a logarithmic scale was appropriate for showing Bitcoin’s enormous percentage increase across a decade.

Those were contemporaneous claims made by BitMEX in the regulatory proceeding, not findings adopted by the ASA.

The chart was accurate in form but unclear in effect

The ASA acknowledged that logarithmic scales can be valid and useful when displaying very large changes over long periods. Its objection was contextual: equally spaced positions represented increases by orders of magnitude, and the advertisement did not explain the scale to a general newspaper audience.

In the regulator’s assessment, readers could interpret the chart as showing a sharp early rise, a relatively steady ascent and then a gentle decline. To illustrate the omitted volatility, the ASA cited approximate bitcoin values of $1,000 at the beginning of 2017, $14,000 in November 2017 and $4,000 when the advertisement appeared in January 2019. Those figures are the ASA’s approximations over its stated measurement window, not Coinburn calculations or a reconstructed exchange-level price series. The ruling did not identify a trading venue, daily fixing time or volume-weighting method for them.

The ASA concluded that references to Bitcoin as an experiment, its price volatility and a challenging road ahead did not offset the campaign’s overall promotional impression. It found breaches of CAP Code Edition 12 rules 3.1 and 3.3 on misleading advertising, rule 3.11 on exaggeration and rule 14.1 on financial products.

What the ruling did—and did not—decide

The August 14 decision concerned advertising content. It was not a court judgment on Bitcoin, a determination that logarithmic charts are inherently deceptive, or a ruling on whether BitMEX’s derivatives were lawful in every jurisdiction. The ASA administers the U.K.’s advertising self-regulatory system; it is distinct from a statutory financial-market authorization decision.

Its institutional significance was nevertheless clear in 2019. Crypto businesses addressing mainstream audiences could be held responsible for the combined impression created by charts, slogans and surrounding copy. Technically defensible data presentation was not enough when the intended audience could reasonably misunderstand volatility, historical performance or investment risk.

This reconstruction is based on the record available for August 14, 2019. Later enforcement or policy developments involving BitMEX or cryptocurrency advertising are separate events and are not used to reinterpret the ruling.