Wyre, a cryptocurrency payments platform, shuts down due to a bear market

By Clark

Wyre said that the firm’s wind-down process has started and that interested parties can now start making inquiries about buying the firm’s assets.

After over ten years in operation, the San Francisco-based cryptocurrency payments company Wyre is closing down. Wyre cites the financial difficulties of the bear market and has nothing to do with any 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 provider Bolt abandoned its intentions to acquire Wyre for $1.5 billion back in September 2022, the company has apparently been spiralling downward.

A few months later, issues began to arise when Juno, a provider of fiat-to-crypto on-ramp solutions, asked its users to remove their crypto assets from the Juno platform and take sole custody as a result of the purported “uncertainty” surrounding its custodial partner Wyre on January 4.

The next day, MetaMask discontinued support for Wyre’s cryptocurrency payment services due to the same problem.

A few days later, Wyre proceeded to set a 90% withdrawal cap for all of its users, but immediately withdrew it on January 13 after receiving funding from an anonymous “strategic partner,” suggesting the company was recovering.

However, it is noteworthy that 75 staff were apparently let go by Wyre in January.

Wyre has now added its name to the growing list of cryptocurrency and blockchain projects and businesses that have failed due to a protracted bear market.

The institutional trading platform TradeBlock from the Digital Currency Group, the Lightning Network payment service BottlePay, the cryptocurrency exchange HotBit, and the NFT platform Terressa all shut down in May alone as a result of the crypto winter.