Wyre, a San Francisco-based cryptocurrency payments company, is closing its doors after almost ten years in operation, citing the financial difficulties caused by the bear market and not by the hawkish “regulatory agency direction” in the United States.
The company wrote in a blog post on June 16 that it has made the tough choice to wind down in order to “protect the best interest of our key stakeholders and customers.”Wyre is still protecting consumer valuables.You can still withdraw whatever assets you have on the Wyre platform through the dashboard until Friday, July 14. After that, we will have a different procedure to reclaim any assets that are still on the platform, according to the company.
Additionally, the Wyre team hinted that its assets are currently up for sale, saying: “If you’re interested in acquiring Wyre’s or its subsidiaries’ assets, please reach out to 88 Partners.” Since one-click checkout business Bolt scrapped its ambitions to buy Wyre for $1.5 billion in September 2022, the company is said to have gone down the gutter. Trouble first surfaced on January 4, 2023, when Juno, a supplier of fiat-to-crypto on-ramp solutions, urged its users to remove their crypto assets off the platform and take self-custody because of the purported “uncertainty” surrounding its custodial partner Wyre.The next day, MetaMask discontinued support for Wyre’s cryptocurrency payment services due to the same problem.
A few days later, Wyre set a 90% withdrawal cap for all users, but immediately lifted it on January 13 after receiving funding from an unknown “strategic partner,” raising hope that the company was recovering.
Additionally, 75 staff were reportedly let go by Wyre in January. Wyre joins a long line of cryptocurrency and blockchain businesses and initiatives that have crumbled under the weight of an extended bear market.Unbanked, a crypto fintech company; BottlePay, a Lightning Network payments platform; HotBit, a cryptocurrency exchange; Terressa, a platform for nonfungible tokens; and TradeBlock, a platform for institutional trading from Digital Currency Group, all shut down in May alone.