By
Mayowa Adebajo
April 15th, 2024
After the termination of its bitcoin wallets, Coinkite is going to focus on hardware-based bitcoin products and services.
Coinkite has announced today that it is terminating its activity on wallet part. The company sounds rather optimistic and underlines that the team will now focus on new products, more decentralized and embodied as hardware products.
This concerns mostly standalone BTC terminals, hardware wallets with a printer and QR scanner, other hardware products for authentication and security of bitcoin users. “We’re still big Bitcoin fans, supporters and Hodlrs, and although Coinkite has been great adventure in the SaaS business, we want to spend more time where our heart is, hardware products, software-”not-as-a-service”, and other exciting new possibilities.”
Customers must have noticed that Coinkite has considerably slowed down publishing new blog posts. It is becoming especially obvious in comparison to the frantic pace the company set three years ago when Coinkite was started.
“We are incredibly proud of serving thousands of businesses and customers, transacting billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. It’s time to focus on fulfilling Bitcoin’s real potential, and enable individuals and businesses to “Be Their Own Bank.”
Coinkite explains that being a centralized bitcoin service does require certain efforts. Indeed, the company has been under DDoS since the very start three years ago. Significant means have been spent on lawyers in order to protect the customers from their own governments. Coinkite admits that all this led to their decision.
Coinkite warns that due to extremely high email volume, customers might be obliged to have patience with support service. It offers a simple and easily understood wind down plan to make the process of wallet termination as smooth as possible:
Immediately:
- Everything works as usual, but…
- No new user sign-ups will be accepted.
- No new API keys.
After 14 days:
- Tor access will end.
- API will be disabled.
- Prorated balances for annual pre-paid plans will be refunded.
- You will be encouraged to withdraw balances on login.
- New receive requests will be prevented (but existing deposits can still proceed).
- Zero balance accounts will be automatically closed.
After at least 30 days:
- All logins will lead to forced withdrawals.
In a month Coinkite will check unclaimed deposits and offer some sort of manual process to claim amounts. In this case customers will have to verify email address, account name and password.
Coinkite was launched in 2012 and became one of the first developers of bitcoin services. In 2014 Coinkite launched multi-signature wallets, its own Bitcoin debit card and expanded its multiple signature service for up to 15 members. Besides, the company came up with its Bitcoin point-of-sale (POS) system offering merchants the possibility to accept the cryptocurrency for settlement through their terminals.