Bitwala, while a great company in the cryptocurrency world, sometimes tends to lose focus of what matters. That is not unusual for a young company with lots of ambition. After launching several new services in recent weeks, the company is turning all of its attention back to Bitcoin. Apparently, hardly anyone is using the support altcoins, which is not a big surprise.
Back To The Bitcoin Basics For Bitwala
Building out a platform to send and receive money worldwide at little to no costs is an ambitious plan in its own right. Bitwala has successfully done so, as they offer many different services. There is a debit card, an option to send and receive wire transfers with Bitcoin, and they also enabled altcoin support. Moreover, the Bitwala Messenger should not be discounted either.
Even though nearly all of these ventures are quite successful, hardly anyone seems to use the support altcoins for transactions. Although there quite a few coins which have significant traction, they are not being used as a currency all that much. For Bitwala, accepting over 40 different altcoins was a bold decision, but it is not entirely going according to plan.
The integration of Shapeshift into the Bitwala platform lets anyone owning supported altcoins to spend them for all services. That means users can top up their debit card with 40 different altcoins it they wanted to do so. For most coins, this is a use case the developers could only dream of when they launched the project.
Unfortunately, Bitwala has noticed no one is using these supported altcoins so far. Some cryptocurrency enthusiasts will say this was to be expected, as there is little to no value in most altcoins, to begin with. But the likes of Ethereum, Monero, and Dash should see some interest. That has not been the case so far, and it remains unclear as to why this is exactly.
So far, roughly 3 Bitcoin in altcoin volume has been used through the Bitwala platform. That is a very disappointing number, to say the least. To put this into numbers, 0.1% of turnover is done through altcoins in the past two months. For now, the company will continue to accept Altcoins, but their focus will shift back to Bitcoin, where it belongs.
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