I just received an interesting email mailer from Snapcard – They’re shutting down. To bring you up to speed, Snapcard is a bookmarklett ‘app’ that, in conjunction with coinbase, allowed users to effectively pay for *everything* sold on the internet using Bitcoin. Snapcard was simply acting as a ‘middle party intermediary’ that was actually paying your desired bill in Fiat (dollars, euros, yuan, etc) and you would simply pay them directly using bitcoin.
This morning they sent me an email which was also reflected on their website:
TO ALL OF OUR USERSThis past year has been an incredible journey for us at SNAPCARD. We launched our bookmarklet last November to help you spend your bitcoins on any website, and the response has been great. It’s been so much fun helping you with your orders, and we can’t thank you enough for your support.We’ve decided to close our bookmarklet business in order to concentrate all our energy on merchant adoption. We’ve shifted our focus to helping merchants accept digital currencies natively so that you won’t need a tool to spend your bitcoin at your favorite businesses. It’s an exciting time for the bitcoin community, and we’re going to keep looking for ways to make it easier for you to spend your bitcoin.
Thank you so much for the great memories thus far. Please continue to support us as we launch our upcoming products and services. Keep in touch!
Sincerely,
Mike & Yanni
Co-founders of SNAPCARD
- This sudden announcement causes me to question a few things: Were they taking consistent losses from use of their application?
- Were they seeing a gradual decline of usage of their service due to the market decline in bitcoin price?
- Were they scammed or did a specific event occur to cause them to lose all profits gained over the course of this year?
- Was this decision based on inside influence or external pressures? (coinbase pressuring them to shut down, the IRS pressuring them to shut down)
I myself didn’t use their service (but was very close to doing so for an engagement ring), although I have used it to try out the usability and liked what they were offering. (if you wanted to buy stuff from amazon or ebay directly without needing to convert your bitcoin to USD you could use snap card to collect the order information and supply a payment in Dollars in exchange for your bitcoin).
The bottom line is that this is an upset surprise to me and I hope that the community can determine a new solution to replace snapcard soon. I can report that a few weeks ago I posted on twitter that Billpayforcoins is doing a reboot to their services and you can pay certain utility bills like cable and electrical bills using their services instead for a small 1.5% fee (up to $9000 USD).
On a final positive note, I commend Michael and Yani for joining me in choosing to focus concentration on Bitcoin Merchant adoption as a concentrated effort, Welcome to the team!
Till the Next Round,
Frankenmint
