The famous bitcoin wallet platform will be closed within a month. The management of the company invites customers to withdraw their funds from the platform and reveals plans to focus on hardware.

Over the first two weeks, everything will work as usual, says the latest Coinkite’s blog post – just no more new user sign-ups. After 14 days, Tor access will end and users will be encouraged to withdraw their bitcoins on login. After 30 days, the withdrawals will be forced.

Coinkite says the decision was made due to the increasing number of legislative and security issues it has been having with the authorities and hackers:

“Being a centralized bitcoin service does attract attention from state actors and other well funded pains in the butt, and as a matter of fact, we’ve been under DDoS since the first month we launched—over three years–yay. Plus we have put real fiat dollars into our lawyers’ pockets, to defend our customers from their own governments. This is not what we love to do, which is coding and delivering awesome services.”

The announcement was a blow to many bitcoiners. The Toronto-based company, founded in 2013, has many thousands of customers. It has been providing multi-sig wallets and merchant tools and allegedly has never lost any customer funds. In the third quarter of 2015, it processed $250 million worth of bitcoin transactions, more than 7% of the total number. Its closure was completely unexpected.

The user trilli0nn wrote on Reddit: “Regulators won this battle, but will lose the war.” Others, more down-to-earth, remarked that “there are too many wallets in the market” and “another web wallet just wasn't something Bitcoin needed.” The user ProHashing blamed the situation on the current condition of the bitcoin network, saying the “bitcoin service quality has been falling for months as fees increase and the network becomes unreliable.”

However, according to the announcement, Coinkite has not lost its faith in cryptocurrency: “We’re still big Bitcoin fans.” The company says it is going to work on hardware solutions such as “Completely standalone BTC terminal/hardware wallet with printer and QR scanner” or Open Dime, a “disposable hardware wallet”, which, according to Coinkite, “can be a godsend in some countries that struggle with limited network infrastructure and corrupt governmental systems.”

Alexey Tereshchenko