Crypto Payments Firm Wyre Announces Closure, Up for Sale!
Wyre Crypto
Summary: The bear market has led to the shutdown of crypto payments firm Wyre. Due to the crypto winter, Wyre has gone the way of many other crypto/blockchain firms and projects. The firm is up for sale and interested parties can contact 88 partners.
After nearly a decade in existence, San Francisco’s crypto payments company Wyre has announced its closure, blaming the difficulties of the bear market rather than any aggressive “regulatory agency direction” in the United States. The company announced its closing on June 16, citing the need to “protect the best interest of our key stakeholders and customers.”
The firm stated:
“Wyre continues to secure customer assets. If you have assets on the Wyre platform, you can continue to withdraw them via Wyre’s dashboard until Friday, July 14th. After then, we will have a separate process to recover assets remaining on the platform.”
Contact 88 Partners for Purchase
Wyre’s team also implied that the company was selling its assets, saying, that interest parties can acquire Wyre’s or its subsidiaries’ assets, by contacting 88 Partners.
Self-custody Played a Key Role
Reportedly, the business has been in a death spiral since September 2022, when one-click checkout startup Bolt abandoned its ambitions to purchase Wyre for $1.5 billion.
A few months later, on January 4th, Juno, a provider of a fiat-to-crypto on-ramp solution, recommended its customers to self-custody their crypto assets rather than leave them on the Juno platform owing to “uncertainty” surrounding its custodial partner Wyre.
MetaMask likewise discontinued support for Wyre’s cryptocurrency payment services the next day for the same reason. A few days later, Wyre instituted a 90% withdrawal restriction for all customers, but on January 13—after getting money from an unknown strategic partner—it was removed, giving hope that the company was on the mend.
Joins Growing List of Closure
As a result of the prolonged bear market, Wyre joins a growing list of crypto and blockchain companies that have folded.
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Unbanked, a crypto fintech company, BottlePay, a Lightning Network payments platform, the cryptocurrency exchange HotBit, the non-fungible token (NFT) platform Terressa, and the institutional trading platform TradeBlock from Digital Currency Group all closed in May alone owing to the crypto winter.
