Crypto Payments Firm Wyre Winding Down Due to ‘Market Conditions’

Updated: 21 June 2023

Disclosure

Don’t invest unless prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment, you shouldn’t expect to be protected if something goes wrong.

Join Our Telegram channel to stay up to date on breaking news coverage

The current market conditions are proving to be a bane to many decade-old businesses. Among them is Wyre, a decade-old crypto payments company that has decided to wind down due to the current volatile circumstances.

Citing market conditions as the reason, the company came out on a Twitter post and said,

This decision has been made to protect the interest of our key stakeholders and customers.

And before you blame that the current regulatory conditions are to blame for it, Wyre has clarified that it was not due to any regulatory issue. That means Wyre is still holding on to the customer’s assets and protecting them.

The Company with Process Withdrawal Requests – But only Until July

Wyre has said that it will continue to fulfill the withdrawal requests of customers until 14th July 2023. Afterward, it will initiate a different process to recover assets for customers. Details of this process, however, will be published at a later date.

It is important to note that the financial qualms that led Wyre to wind down aren’t new. In 2022, online payment provider Bolt tried to buy Wyre for $1.5 billion. However, the deal couldn’t go through.

The reason for that failure was two-fold. Many thought that Bolt’s lofty $11 billion valuation during a time when the fintech industry was in shambles was not the right idea. Just a few months ago, Bolt’s primary rival Fast, closed its doors as well.

The second reason is the doubts about the one-click checkout model. Although convenient, this particular model introduced a host of security issues that no one can ignore.

Wyre Employees Got Notification Early

The current liquidation is months in the making. Employees received the notification from Wyre CEO Giannaros via email that he would be liquidating the company and had plans to terminate the services that month.

Naturally, it created doubts about the future of the company. But Giannaros was quick to say that employees need not worry. A week later, the company decided to limit the withdrawals. Those series of events gave people the same sense of collapse as when FTX and Celsius ended up crashing in 2022.

But now that the company is shutting down in the name of the “best interest of the community,” those who got wind of the current situation earlier might now be in a better condition.

What Lies in the Future of Wyre?

Winding down marks the end of the company. While many hoped that someone would come around for a last-ditch effort to save the payment solutions provider, nothing is happening. In the end, Wyre is the same story as many other crypto enterprises that we have heard so many times since the arrival of crypto winter.

But for now, customers of Wyre must closely watch the official website and its blogs since more information will be provided through that later.

Are The Current Regulatory Conditions Really Not to Blame?

While Wyre has said that none of the decisions that it has made regarding the recent wind down is due to regulatory issues, the timing says otherwise. The crypto economy is amidst immense volatility due to no small part of these regulatory problems. It is likely that Wyre was on its last legs already, and the regulatory issues ended up aggravating its issues.

But now that the company is winding down, we might never know the real reason.

Smog (SMOG) - Meme Coin With Rewards

Rating