LocalBitcoins, a major trading platform for Bitcoin (BTC) has made an announcement in regard to its operations. The firm has dropped alarming news on the users that it will be going out of business.
LocalBitcoins Decides to Shut Down
The company has announced that it is going to discontinue its operations. The firm had been operating for more than a decade and now, it has decided to shut down its business.
As per the officials, the company had been facing many challenges and it has ended up causing the highest amount of impact on LocalBitcoins.
The company had been trying really hard to make it through the difficult times. However, none of the firms had taken into account the length of the winter that the crypto industry faced.
As a result of the cryptocurrency market downtrend, many firms became the victims and were forced to shut down.
Although many firms were able to make it through the crypto winter, LocalBitcoins was not able to face the downtrend.
Therefore, the company has announced that it is going to shut down its operations. It was on February 9 when the officials at LocalBitcoins made the announcement of shutting down their operations.
They confirmed that due to the long-running bearish market, their finances became unstable. They continued facing losses but wanted to operate, hoping that the situation would become normal.
Unfortunately, it never came to that and as a result, they have no choice but to shut down their operations.
The officials stated that they are sad that they made the decision but there was nothing else they could do in the particular matter.
The company officials claimed that they did whatever they had in their power to deal with the crisis in the crypto industry. However, the crypto-winter took too long to normalize.
Even now, the situation is not fully in favor of the cryptocurrency industry’s recovery. Therefore, they have decided that they will no longer continue with their operations.
Service Suspension Update
The company has announced that from February 9, it will stop taking new requests for signups. Therefore, no more new users will be able to become part of the platform to perform Bitcoin trades.
Once the above has been taken care of, they will proceed with the discontinuation and trading. In addition to the trade discontinuation, they will discontinue the activities for the crypto wallets.
They have decided to discontinue both services from February 16.
Going forward, users will not be able to carry out withdrawals for cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin. They have decided that after February 17, the users will not be able to withdraw funds in altcoins.
Instead, the users will be able to withdraw their funds in the form of Bitcoin after February 17.
For a long time, the firm had been expanding its trading portfolio for cryptocurrencies. The firm started its trading business with Bitcoin but it continued expanding its portfolio
Over the course of time, it continued adding more and more cryptocurrencies so that users could take advantage of that.
Unfortunately, a single year worsened things for the Bitcoin trading platform and it has to shut down. According to market experts, it is the first victim of the bearish market in the year 2023.
Analysts are predicting that more firms providing similar services to the services may announce discontinuations in their services.
Winter’s Impact on other Companies
LocalBitcoins is not the only company that had to suffer from a terrible situation in the year 2022.
Even some of the largest names in the cryptocurrency industry had to take strict measures in order to keep running their businesses.
Some of the major examples include the Huobi, Bybit, and Coinbase exchanges. Throughout the year 2022, these exchanges had to cut down on their employees in an attempt to cut costs.
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