Posted by AllCrypt Staff on March 10, 2015

It’s with both a heavy heart, and excited anticipation that I write this blog post today.

AllCrypt.com will be, temporarily, closing down operations as of 3/31/15. We’ve been open a little over a year now, and while we never truly achieved the level of success that I believed we would, we came far, but for now, it’s time to hit the pause button and re-evaluate the landscape.

The past year has brought a great many changes to AllCrypt.com – mostly internal and invisible to the end user. Not all of them were good changes. We lost a lot of staff when we moved from an hourly pay scale to a per-incident system, due to the big discrepancy between profit the site was making (none, whatsoever) and the payroll we were paying out. Lost a few more when better offers came around, and our support suffered. And of course we always had the chicken and the egg syndrome – we needed volume to pay the bills, and we needed to keep paying the bills to generate the volume. That’s a large reason our site never got the facelift it needed, and why the margin trading and shorting backend, which was 99% functional, never went live – the budget was never there to support the site.

The site needs an overhaul, badly, and myself and my partners need a break. The site has been littered with abandoned coins who’s wallets are a nightmare to keep online, we have tons of support tickets to handle and not enough staff to do it right, and after a year, we are still very much “in the hole” as profits go and paying the bills out of our own pockets (well, mine, specifically.)

AllCrypt.com was my baby – born from frustration that other exchanges were not providing the services I wanted. Unfortunately, between the time the idea was born, and when we launched, mintpal and bittrex hit the scene, and there was just no catching up. Bad timing. I still attest that we had the better platform. Yes, the visual design was poor (blame low starting budget on that one – more money going to hardware and services than to ‘unnecessary’ things like how pretty it was), but we had the speed, features, and innovation no one else had.

We, unfortunately, also did not have the glitz and the marketing budget. To this day I believe we were small, because we were small. Over and over we’d help coins launch to great success, only to see forum posts like “if we could only get on a good exchange” – to which I’d always reply – you ARE on one. And we’ll never get as big as the other guys if we’re only ever seen as a stepping stone. The only thing that combats that is a massive pile of money for marketing, something we never had.

So, we’re closing the doors for a bit. I do not intend for this to be forever. But the cost of keeping the site up and running, managing support tickets, and dealing with massive amounts of wallet issues we have on a day-to-day basis is becoming prohibitive, both financially, and to my family.

So it’s with a heavy heart we close the doors for a while. Without having to maintain the wallets, the security, the support, I’ll have a lot more time and money to be able to revamp the site. When will we re-open? No idea. Will we for sure re-open? That’s the plan, but life never works out the way you think it will, so I don’t want to make a promise I might not be able to keep.

We were going to just shut the site down, and walk away, with the hope that maybe one day we could revive it. Then I started doing some work, fixing up a few things to prepare for this post – and realized that I just love this thing too much to walk away forever. So, for now, we are closing shop, and I can focus on getting the whole thing back in order, getting some financial backing so that we can come back with a marketing plan, and be the site that I always intended it to be.

We will be staying open until 3/31/15 to allow everyone to withdraw their funds. Many of the altcoin wallets are broken – mostly because the coins have been abandoned. Some of the coins that were copycats being run by those who don’t understand crypto had bugs, issues that caused some wallets to become a little insolvent (wildly fluctuating transaction fees, transactions that show in a block to later become invalidated, etc) – and to assuage any concerns, BTC, LTC and DOGE wallets are perfectly fine – those are solid coins without issue. But my point is some of the altcoins may not be available to fully withdraw because of those various issues beyond our control. We cannot do anything about that. Sorry folks, the coin is dead, or broken. But for the bigger coins, the major ones out there, the ones that are still kicking, we’ll keep the doors open.

Once we close the doors however, we need to turn off the servers, cancel the zendesk support system contract, and all that goes with it. Meaning – once we close the doors, we cannot issue any further withdrawals. That being said, we will absolutely keep everything in stasis. If and when we re-open, be it a few months or a few years from now, any abandoned balances will be intact (assuming those coins are still alive!)

I personally truly feel that it is a shame. We offered so much more than the other sites did. Faster support, immediate use of funds, instant withdrawals, innovative features everyone else copied… but… we were not “big” so we were viewed as “less than”.

Maybe next time. That’s my plan anyway.

Thanks for all the fun this past year. See you all around.