The owners of the bitcoin marketplace Harborly have decided to stop the operations ostensibly to work on a new and more promising project. Harborly joins the ranks of numerous other bitcoin companies closed this year.

The site of the startup, launched a year ago, does not function anymore. It only tells that the site is closing down. The users are redirected to a blog post describing the reasons of the closure and remembering how it all started. According to the authors, the original vision was to give users “the simplest, quickest, and safest way to buy and sell Bitcoin globally using their local currency”. And while “the past year was amazing” and the vision has not changed, state the authors, “we recognize that now is the time to move on”.

The company offered its services in Canada and United States and planned to launch in India. It was positioned as a company bridging a gap between digital currency and traditional financial market. It was not hacked. Indeed, it did not have any security-related problems. It is closed because there is a new venture ahead, with a great potential, says the blog. The owners of Harborly cannot dedicate their time to the company anymore and look for somebody to buy it.

Harborly joins the ranks of many bitcoin companies that ceased operations this year just without any major problems caused by hackers or by scam. CoinFox wrote about a number of such failure stories. In April 2015, U.S. bitcoin exchange Buttercoin closed its doors, stating that the company could not “generate enough venture capital interest to continue funding”. It was followed by a once popular bitcoin marketplace Brawker, and then, in May, by a Hong Kong startup Melotic, both telling they did not have enough growth to continue. The main reason behind all these failures was exposed in the farewell blog post by Brawker:

“The bitcoin community came up with many great startups and the environment is very different from what it was 18 months ago, when we started working on this project.”

As the bitcoin ecosystem becomes denser, the startups that do not offer something exclusive, will have a hard time trying to compete against the leaders of the industry.  

Alexey Tereshchenko