The Miami-based CBlocks team made $32,000 in 30 days, selling a mystery box of cryptocurrencies to people who wanted to start trading crypto but didn't know how.

Demand was high, but the team quickly stopped processing orders to avoid legal issues.

Its lawyers couldn't decide if it was a money services company or not — a US regulatory distinction which could be costly for the company to get wrong.

So now CBlocks is moving to Canada, where its Floridian founders believe it can thrive with cheaper regulatory expenses.



In January, Auston Bunsen and two of his friends stumbled upon a very lucrative idea: help the tech illiterate learn about cryptocurrencies by taking the guesswork out of investing.

That idea became CBlocks, a mystery box of cryptocurrencies, sent on demand. The concept was simple: Interested parties pay the team however much they want to invest, plus a $50 service fee. Then, Cblocks purchases five random currencies on the customer's behalf, and loads them onto an encrypted USB stick that acts as a wallet.

With just a website and some press coverage, the team made $55,000 selling these USB wallets — $32,000 of that in a 30 day period.

"There's all these little obstacles that prevent normal people from getting started in cryptocurrencies. So what we do is allow people to choose what risk level they're happy with. And then we let them pay us," Bunsen tells Business Insider.

But CBlocks came upon an obstacle of its own. High fees, and a lack of clarity around cryptocurrency regulations, left CBlocks in a legal gray area. Even its lawyers couldn't decide where CBlocks falls in terms of regulations.

So Bunsen and his team decided to move the company to Canada.

CBlocks was born out of a conversation at a Miami coding school

Bunsen met his cofounders PK Banks and Mario Aguayo through the Miami, Florida-based code bootcamp Wyncode Academy, where they worked full-time.

Bunsen described Banks as a former Wall Streeter who got bored and wanted to try something different before learning to code. Aguayo is a former agent for models, who Bunsen describes as having a "a lot of grit." He says Aguayo came to Wyncode as a student before joining its operations team.

Bunsen himself is a self-taught programmer and serial startup founder and engineer. He's kept his job as lead instructor at Wyncode while things ramp up at CBlocks, but he plans to leave next week to focus on this new venture.

CBlock is an encrypted USB key for storing digital coins. CBlocks

While the founders had all spent time around startups, they more or less stumbled upon the concept for CBlocks.

They were sitting around at Wyncode, shooting the breeze, when Aguayo asked what the best way was to get involved in cryptocurrency. Inspired by the website CryptoRoulette.info, Bunsen said he told him to invest in five random cryptocurrencies to get started.

Crypto Roulette is a site that lets visitors answer the very specific question: if you had invested $1,000 in six completely random coins on a completely random date in 2017, how much would those coins be worth today? The answer can be staggeringly high. Don't look if you don't want to get FOMO.

Banks popped into the conversation and said he got paid by a "finance buddy" to load cryptocurrencies onto a ledger and send it to him, according to Bunsen. That was all the inspiration they needed.

One weekend later, the website went live and CBlocks was born.

US law is unclear, so CBlocks decided to leave the country