It seems things have gone from bad to worse for Changelly. As most people know, Changelly is a competitor to ShapeShift. The company facilitates instant exchanges between various cryptocurrencies without the need for an account. It is one of the projects built by the MinerGate team. However, the platform has recently been facing a lot of complaints seemingly not addressed by its customer support team.
What is up With Changelly?
Looking over the Changelly subreddit, there are a lot of complaints to be found. Whether all of them are justified is a different matter, but it does not look good regardless. There appears to be a growing number of reports related to transactions that have either not completed, failed, or gone missing. That is never a good sign for instant exchange services, considering that all of these transactions pertain to receiving funds, rather than sending them to the company.
These issues are not linked to any one cryptocurrency either, which only makes things even more complicated. It seems any form of deposit shows up just fine, but exchanging to another currency of your choice is a massive problem right now. Failed transactions and not issuing refunds for “stuck” transfers is wholly unacceptable. All of this has caused delays for users who rely on instant exchange services. If one’s transfer takes 24 hours or more to complete due to an error, it defeats the purpose of instant exchanges entirely.
A lot of these issues go back one or more days, indicating that Changelly has done little to address the problem. It is expected that users would start complaining on Reddit, as that is often the fastest way to get a response. The same happens with most cryptocurrency exchanges experiencing long support ticket queues. In a lot of cases, pinging the company on Reddit magically spawns a representative who will deliver help within the hour. By contrast, Changelly has yet to issue official responses to anyone on Reddit.
One user stated that he had received an email from the Changelly support team alluding to “technical issues” and indicating that most of these problems would be resolved in the next two to three days. Though that will put some people’s minds at ease, it still does not explain why the company has been struggling suddenly. Rest assured that there will be plenty of speculation regarding this development. In all likelihood, it will only be a matter of time before rumors regarding hacks or insolvency surface. Until the company issues a statement, such rumors should be ignored.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to gauge how much money is currently missing or stuck. However, there are a lot of very annoyed Changelly users right now and understandably so. Until the company solves all of these problems, things will continue to be challenging for them. PR nightmares like these can haunt companies for weeks, if not months or years. We sincerely hope that all affected users see their money again one way or another, but it remains to be seen if that will be the case anytime soon.
Interestingly enough, the company has remained active on social media, but has not issued any statement regarding the ongoing issues. It did post a tutorial on how to exchange Bitcoin for Bitcoin Cash, which means the platform will support BCH from now on. However, supporting the new currency will do them little good if dozens of users are complaining about missing funds. It will be interesting to see how and if the company responds to this list of problems. If all goes according to plan, everything should be back in order by Friday at the latest. Whether or not that will be the case remains to be seen.
Statement from Changelly:
Recently, Changelly faced minor technical issues with Bitcoin Cash only, whereas other coins functioned properly. The matter was caused by coin instability and slow mining. As a result, our entire team focused on the solution and pushed all the stuck transactions through. Eventually, 99.5% the transactions stuck this way are processed and complete. The major part of our users are happy with the outcome, it can be seen in a lot of positive feedback posted lately on the range of platforms including Reddit itself.
Changelly has over 300 thousand customers making over 3000 transactions daily. It’s quite important to react promptly. To make sure our users are supported whenever they need it, we have doubled our support team that responded to customers’ numerous queries right away. We do hope that every user that experienced any difficulties with exchange is satisfied now.
