Why Your MEXC Connection Keeps Dying, and How to Stop It

Three months after you set it up, the MEXC balance in your tracker freezes. No error you would notice, no email, no banner in the app, no obvious cause. The number just stops moving, and you find out weeks later when the total looks stale.

This is not a bug in your tracker and it is not an attack. MEXC deliberately expires API keys that have no IP address bound to them, on a ninety-day clock, and that policy catches more people than every other MEXC quirk combined.

What is the 90-day rule, exactly?

MEXC's own API documentation states it flatly: an API key without a linked IP address is valid for 90 days and then expires automatically. Each key can carry up to ten linked addresses. Bind at least one and the expiry clock is not the thing that kills your connection.

If you would rather not bind an address, MEXC gives you a renewal path. In the five days before a key lapses you can set a renewal from the API key page, which extends its validity by another 90 days. That works, and it requires you to remember something on a quarterly cycle forever, which is a worse deal than entering a few IP addresses once.

The addresses to enter are the ones your tracking app publishes in its connection instructions. They belong to the servers doing the querying. Entering your home IP is the classic mistake here and produces a connection that never works at all, with a failure that looks exactly like a bad key. Read-only API keys covers why the allowlist points at the service rather than at you.

Bind the address, and while you are there, note the label you gave the key. When you eventually rotate or revoke it you will want to know which app it belonged to. How to revoke an API key covers doing that cleanly.

How do I create a read-only key on MEXC?

MEXC puts the controls under your profile rather than in a settings submenu, and the permission checkboxes are unusually granular. Where most exchanges give you one Read toggle, MEXC breaks reading into several separate items grouped under Spot and Futures headings, which is more control and more opportunity to miss one.

1. Open API Management from the account icon on the MEXC website. There is no equivalent creation flow buried in the mobile app; do this on desktop.
2. Name the key after the service you are connecting, and accept the risk reminder MEXC displays.
3. Under the Spot section, enable the viewing permissions only. MEXC words these as separate items covering account details, order and trade details, deposit and withdrawal records, and transfer information. A tracker wants the read side of all of them, and that combination is what produces a complete balance and a usable history.
4. Leave anything that grants order placement unticked. Reading your fills is not the same as being allowed to create them, and MEXC keeps those separable. A portfolio tracker needs the first and never the second.
5. Leave Withdraw unticked. This is the permission that can actually lose you money, and nothing in portfolio tracking needs it.
6. Leave Transfer unticked as well. It only moves funds between accounts you own, and it is still not required to read a balance.
7. Leave the Futures permissions unticked unless your tracker explicitly says it reads MEXC contracts, which most do not for reasons covered below.
8. Link your IP addresses, then complete the email and authenticator verification MEXC demands before it will show you anything.
9. Copy the access key and the secret key. The secret appears once.

Everything you left unticked is enforced by MEXC, not by the app you hand the key to. An order request signed with a key that carries no trading permission is rejected at MEXC's end. With trading and withdrawal switched off the result is a read-only key, and a read-only key cannot move funds: it reads balances and history, and that is the full extent of what MEXC will let it do. That is the entire security argument, and it does not depend on trusting the tracker's intentions. Is it safe to connect an exchange works through the exposure that genuinely does remain, which is informational rather than financial.

Why do half my MEXC holdings show no price?

Here is the part that is specific to MEXC rather than to API keys in general.

MEXC's whole positioning is breadth. It lists thousands of tokens, many of them very early, many of them trading in meaningful volume on MEXC and essentially nowhere else. That is precisely why people use it. It is also why a portfolio tracker connected to MEXC behaves differently than one connected to a venue that lists two hundred majors.

A tracker values what it can price. Pricing comes from aggregated market data across venues, and a token with one thin market has either no aggregated price or a price that swings wildly depending on which source answered first. So a MEXC connection tends to produce two categories of holding: the ones that resolve cleanly and the ones that appear as a correct quantity with an empty or implausible value beside them.

Neither case means your coins are missing. The quantity came straight from MEXC and is right. What is missing is a defensible valuation, and no tracker can invent one. Why the same coin shows different prices in different apps explains where those numbers come from and when to distrust them.

Two practical responses. For a token you actually care about, add it as a manual position with your real acquisition price so cost basis survives even if live pricing does not; adding a manual position covers the mechanics. For the rest, especially airdropped or promotional tokens you never bought, filter them out so they stop cluttering the holdings list. Spam and dust token filtering covers the threshold approach.

If a token you held gets pulled from MEXC entirely, which happens more often on a venue with this listing policy, the position tends to freeze at its last known value rather than disappear. What happens when a coin is delisted covers the cleanup.

What else will not import?

Futures is the notable absence. MEXC's perpetual contract API has spent long stretches under upgrade and maintenance notices, and MEXC has publicly narrowed API access, describing full API application as primarily aimed at institutional users after KYB review. The upshot is that many third-party integrations read MEXC spot only and say so in the fine print. If you carry meaningful futures exposure there, plan to record it by hand.

Margin balances, fiat holdings and MEXC's ETF-style tokens are commonly outside what integrations cover, for similar reasons. Sub-accounts issue their own keys. And MEXC's automated trading policy is stricter than most, with account freezes for bot activity it considers abusive, which is a reason to be scrupulous about the read-only choice rather than a reason to avoid connecting.

The MEXC account is worth tracking precisely because it holds the things nothing else lists. Treat the key as maintenance you do once, with the IP bound so it does not lapse, and treat the unpriced positions as bookkeeping rather than breakage. The next time a MEXC listing gets picked up by a major venue, the price appears on its own and the position resolves without you doing anything.