Binance delisting of EPIC and QUICK from October 20: what to check now

Binance announced the delisting of Epic Chain (EPIC) and QuickSwap (QUICK) on Wednesday morning: spot trading in both tokens ends on October 28, 2026 at 03:00 UTC. For holders, though, that is not the most important date. October 20 is. On that day four deadlines expire, after which the exchange itself determines when and at what price a position is unwound. Which of them hits you depends on the product your tokens sit in: the spot account, futures, the margin account, copy trading or Simple Earn.

In total the announcement names fifteen dates between October 15 and December 29. Three of them cost money if you sleep through them, because they trigger automatic selling or settlement. The rest only cost you the option to trade. This article sorts the dates by what they mean for your balance, rather than by the order of the product sections at Binance. If you want to move your holdings to another platform anyway, the overview of crypto exchanges with authorisation in Germany will help you choose.

What Binance announced: spot trading ends on October 28

Binance reviews listed tokens at fixed intervals. In its delisting announcement of October 14, 2026 the exchange names eleven criteria on which it decides. They include trading volume and liquidity, the quality of development work, the network's stability against attacks, the project team's responsiveness to periodic review requests, and new regulatory requirements. Which criterion tipped the balance in the case of Epic Chain and QuickSwap, Binance does not say.

The core of the announcement is one sentence: as of October 28, 2026 at 03:00 UTC the exchange halts trading in all spot pairs of the two tokens. All open trading orders are removed automatically in the process. Trading bots running on these pairs are terminated by Binance at the same moment.

Delisting does not mean expropriation

A delisting is the removal of a token from trading on an exchange. The balance initially stays in the account; it simply can no longer be traded there. In this case Binance keeps withdrawals open for a further two months beyond the end of trading. That span is the real room for manoeuvre you have, and it is considerably larger than the few days some exchanges allow.

Four deadlines fall on October 20

On Monday, October 20, four mechanisms take effect one after another, each in a different product. All four share the same pattern: you can trade for yourself beforehand, and afterwards the system trades.

• 03:00 UTC — Binance Pool discontinues mining support for the tokens. The final payout is settled the following day. Binance Pay removes the tokens at the same time.
• 07:00 UTC — VIP Loan and Flexible Loan close all open loan positions in which the tokens serve as a borrowable asset or as collateral.
• 08:30 UTC — For the futures contracts of the two tokens you can no longer open new positions.
• 09:00 UTC — Binance Futures closes all open positions and settles them automatically. The Funding Rate Arbitrage Bot ends all arbitrage strategies on these symbols in the same minute.
• 10:00 UTC — Binance Margin takes the tokens out of Cross, Isolated and Portfolio Margin. The exchange calls this moment the "Margin Scheduled Delisting Time".

Counted strictly, then, there are five times on that day, four of which trigger an automatic unwinding. Anyone holding only a spot balance is not affected on October 20 at all and has until October 28.

Futures: forced settlement at 09:00 UTC, no selling of your own after that

For the futures contracts, October 20 is the end. Binance puts it like this: "Binance Futures will close all positions and conduct an automatic settlement on the contracts of the aforementioned token(s) at 2026-10-20 09:00 (UTC)." After settlement the contracts are removed. The exchange explicitly advises closing open positions yourself beforehand.

The difference is practical, not theoretical. If you close yourself, you pick the moment and therefore the price. If the system settles, you get the settlement level, and in a market environment where liquidity is thinning anyway because of the announcement. Binance also reserves the right to take protective measures beforehand, without further notice, in the event of sharp price swings: lowering the maximum leverage, capping the position value, raising the maintenance margin in the margin tiers, adjusting funding rates and carrying the mark price forward via the protected last price.

What the protective measures mean for a leveraged holder

If the maximum leverage in a margin tier is lowered, the collateral required for an existing position rises. If the balance is then not enough, liquidation comes before October 20 rather than on it. A leveraged position in a token with a delisting date is therefore the case that leaves the least time.

Margin, VIP Loan and Flexible Loan: collateral pays off the debt

In the margin account the mechanics are the most layered. Since the announcement you can no longer transfer the two tokens into the margin account, neither by hand nor via auto-transfer mode. One exception applies if you have open liabilities in that token: then you may top up at most the amount of that liability, less collateral already present. On October 15 at 06:00 UTC Binance additionally suspends borrowing on the affected cross-margin tokens and isolated-margin pairs.

At the Margin Scheduled Delisting Time on October 20 at 10:00 UTC, different things then happen depending on the state of the account. In Isolated Margin the exchange closes the positions, settles them, cancels all open orders and removes the pairs. In Cross and Portfolio Margin it first offsets collateral against liabilities in the same token. If a remainder is left after that, one of two procedures applies:

• If you hold the tokens only as collateral: Binance sells them into USDT or USDC, and the proceeds go to the margin balance. The exchange states that it accepts no liability for losses arising from this.
• If you hold the tokens only as a liability: all open orders in the cross-margin account are cancelled, then the system sells other collateral, buys the delisting tokens with it and repays the debt in full.

During this process you cannot change your positions, and according to the exchange it takes around three hours. Portfolio Margin users should top up their margin balance beforehand and keep an eye on the Unified Maintenance Margin Ratio: if a token drops out of the account's valuation, that alone can trigger a liquidation.

Copy trading on October 21: forced sale at the market price

Spot Copy Trading removes the pairs on October 21 at 03:00 UTC. The decisive sentence of the announcement reads: "After this time, any outstanding assets will be force-sold at market price or moved to the Spot Account if the amount is unsellable."

This deadline affects a group that often does not track its holdings individually at all. Anyone following a trader holds that trader's positions pro rata without having selected them. A look at the composition of your own copy portfolio is therefore worthwhile this week even if you have never heard of Epic Chain and QuickSwap.

Simple Earn: flexible and locked products are unwound automatically

Binance Simple Earn takes the tokens out on October 21 at 07:00 UTC. You can redeem flexible and locked positions yourself beforehand. If you do not, Binance unwinds them automatically at that moment and transfers the amount, together with accrued rewards, to the spot account.

With locked products that is the point at which a fixed-term commitment ends early. Whether the promised yield is credited in full or only the amount accrued up to that point depends on the terms of the individual product. The announcement speaks of "any accrued rewards". Anyone running a longer lock-up should look up the terms of their specific product in the app rather than budgeting for a full period.

Dual Investment and Convert Low-Value Assets

For Dual Investment the subscription window closes the following Friday at 08:00 UTC; unsettled subscriptions are refunded on that date and credited to the spot account within four hours, with the reward calculated on the actual term. Convert Low-Value Assets, the function for tiny holdings, removes the tokens on October 27 at 02:00 UTC, and Binance Convert itself on October 28 at 02:00 UTC, an hour before the end of spot trading.

Spot trading, trading bots and Convert: the dates between October 15 and 29

Three dates bracket the end of trading. As early as October 15 at 03:00 UTC, Binance takes the tokens out of "Buy & Sell Crypto", that is, out of the simple purchase route by card or balance. On October 28 at 03:00 UTC spot trading ends, all open orders are removed, trading bots on these pairs are terminated and gift cards with these tokens are cancelled. And on October 29 at 03:00 UTC deposits are no longer credited.

That last point is the least conspicuous trap in the whole sequence. Anyone who sends EPIC or QUICK from their own wallet or another exchange to their Binance address after October 29 is transferring to an address that no longer books the incoming amount. A deposit address does not disappear the moment an exchange stops serving it, and a transaction on the blockchain cannot be recalled.

The withdrawal deadline on December 28 is the hard limit

Binance will no longer support withdrawals of the two tokens after December 28, 2026 at 03:00 UTC. From today that is around eleven weeks away. It is the date to put a calendar entry on if you want to keep the tokens rather than sell them: after it, the balance sits in an account from which you can no longer move it yourself.

Eleven weeks sounds like plenty of time. In past delistings this deadline was nonetheless the most common reason for lost holdings, because it sits so far out that it slips from view. We have been through this with Binance twice already, with the delisting of ICX, SCRT and STORJ and with the removal of six tokens in August. In both cases the gap between the end of trading and the withdrawal cut-off likewise ran to a double-digit number of weeks.

Conversion into stablecoins: Binance explicitly does not promise it

After December 29, 2026 at 03:00 UTC, Binance may convert delisted tokens into stablecoins on behalf of users. The announcement, however, attaches a clear caveat: "Please note that the conversion of delisted tokens into stablecoins is not guaranteed." So this is not a commitment. If a conversion does happen, the exchange will announce it separately beforehand, and the stablecoins then land in the Binance account.

In the event that a conversion is not technically possible, Binance keeps withdrawals open as far as the network is available. That fallback is stated expressly in the announcement. I would not rely on it, because it hangs on the availability of a blockchain whose project is currently losing its largest trading venue.

Epic Chain and QuickSwap: what is behind the two tokens

QuickSwap is a decentralised exchange on Polygon. There, the QUICK token serves for voting on protocol changes and for a share in trading fees. A decentralised exchange, DEX for short, is a trading venue that matches orders not in a company's order book but through contracts on a blockchain. The protocol itself continues to run independently of Binance and is reachable via the QuickSwap project site. The delisting affects trading in QUICK on Binance, not the functioning of the decentralised exchange.

Epic Chain is a layer 1 blockchain of its own, and EPIC is its network token. A layer 1 blockchain is a blockchain with its own consensus layer that does not sit on top of another. Here too the same applies: the network continues to run, regardless of where the token is traded. What falls away is the largest venue on which it could be exchanged for euros or stablecoins. For a token with a small market capitalisation that is no minor loss, because liquidity is then spread across several smaller platforms.

The price before the cut-off: QUICK down 30 percent in a day

Both tokens reacted sharply to the announcement. On Wednesday midday, according to CoinGecko data, QUICK stood at $0.0069, around 30 percent below the previous day's level, and EPIC at $0.36, around 16 percent below. During the morning the decline in QUICK had still been around 23 percent, so it widened over the course of the day.

The scale of the holdings involved is modest. QUICK carries a market capitalisation of around $4.6 million, EPIC of around $12.1 million. The striking figure is EPIC's trading volume: at around $22.5 million in 24 hours it exceeded the market capitalisation, a sign that a large part of the circulating supply changed hands in a single day. For comparison with the wider market: Bitcoin traded at around $82,800 at the same midday, less than one percent below the previous day. The slump in EPIC and QUICK therefore does not come from the overall market.

A confusion of names that can cost money

Alongside Epic Chain there is the token Epic Cash, which has a similar name and is not affected by the delisting. Anyone sorting through their holdings should go by the ticker and not by the name alone. The one affected is Epic Chain, with the ticker EPIC.

Holding period and tax: a forced sale is a sale

For investors in Germany the automatic unwinding has a consequence that is not in the announcement. Under section 23 of the German Income Tax Act, crypto assets count as other economic assets. A gain from selling them stays tax-free if more than one year lies between purchase and sale. Within that year the gain is taxable, to the extent that the sum of all private disposal transactions in the year reaches the 1,000-euro threshold.

A forced sale by the exchange is, for tax purposes, a sale like any other. If Binance settles your position on October 20 or 21 and you only bought the tokens this year, a taxable event arises whose timing you did not decide. If your purchase is more than a year back, however, the date changes nothing for tax.

What you need for your tax return

In both cases the documentation is what matters: purchase date, purchase price, sale date and sale price for each position. Binance provides the transaction history for export, and it makes sense to download it before the end of trading, while the pairs are still shown in full in the account. Anyone using several exchanges is better off bringing the statements together in one document, because the threshold applies across all transactions in a year. Binding advice on your own case comes only from the tax office or a tax adviser.

Four cut-off dates in eight days: Kraken is delisting in parallel

Anyone trading on several exchanges has more than one calendar entry this week. Kraken is removing a package of tokens from trading at the same time, with its own withdrawal deadline at the end of October. Together with the Binance dates on October 20, 21 and 28, that makes four cut-off dates in eight days for an investor with accounts at both houses.

The pattern has been repeating for months with changing venues. At Bybit, too, there was a gap of weeks between the end of trading and the withdrawal cut-off, in which holdings could be left behind. In practice that means: a small residual holding in a token an exchange removes is the item most often forgotten, because it is too small to stand out and large enough to be annoying. For larger holdings you want to keep, self-custody via a hardware wallet is the route that makes you independent of delisting dates.

Binance delisting: on October 20 the exchange chooses for you

The list of dates is long, the decision behind it is short. Until October 20 you have the choice over timing and price; after that the system has it. Three steps are enough not to miss the deadline:

1. By October 19: look up where the tokens sit. In your Binance account, open the overviews for spot, futures, margin, copy trading and Simple Earn separately from one another. A holding in futures, margin or copy trading has its cut-off on October 20 and 21, a spot balance only on the 28th. If you come across further tiny holdings while doing so, a look at the exchange comparison is worthwhile: consolidating several accounts at one house saves you exactly this search at the next delisting.
2. By October 28: sell or move. Decide whether you turn the tokens into money or keep them. For a move you need the correct receiving address on the matching network beforehand, and after October 29 Binance no longer accepts deposits of these tokens. For self-custody over a longer period, a hardware wallet is the variant in which no third party sets the deadline.
3. By December 28: withdraw the balance and document the sale. After that date Binance no longer supports withdrawals, and the conversion into stablecoins is expressly not promised. Download the transaction history beforehand; for consolidating across several exchanges, portfolio trackers with tax reporting help.

(As of October 14, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)