Effective immediately, BlockTrades will no longer support customers trading cryptocurrency. Instead we will entirely focus our business on its founding purpose, the development of blockchain-related software.

Why end the service?

For a while now, BlockTrades' cryptocurrency trading service has been operating at a small loss.

My partner, Donna and I, have been considering shutting down that part of our business for a long time, but we continued operating as long as seemed feasible because we felt we had some duty to continue supporting our long term customers.

We long ago decided that we wouldn’t try to expand BlockTrades into a large business, but instead keep it focused on supporting the community that we feel affection for, namely the Hive community.

But with increasing legislation and regulatory requirements, it has been come difficult for our small business to handle the increasing overhead. At this point, it seems that small cryptocurrency businesses like ours just don’t have sufficient headroom to compete.

Another factor in this decision has been my own lack of interest in the cryptocurrency exchange business. I’m much more interested in technology than in business, and operating our cryptocurrency business has always been a major distraction for me personally. So while I’m sad to some extent to end this business after being involved with it for so long, I’m also looking forward to being able to focus my future efforts on the technologies that I hope can best contribute to a better future.

Also, I want to be clear that we will continue to donate our time towards the development of software to serve the Hive community. I remain passionately committed to this work.