Sharexcoin, a new fledgling cryptocurrency exchange has shut down its doors within one week of operations, taking with it all the cryptocurrencies of the depositors. The exchange was a branch-off of Sharecoin, a new PoS cryptocurrency that was given out to the members of Bitcointalk forum. It is unclear at this stage whether this was a well-orchestrated scam or whether the owner was hacked and lost the coins. For continued updates, see the ANN thread of Sharecoin. At the time of this writing, the website is completely inaccessible and there is no way for the depositors to withdraw their funds.

The owner has a Bitcointalk id of ziplibrary and has not logged in since June 3rd 2014.

The community is still scrambling about the effects, with some people losing a lot of their Bitcoins/altcoins on this exchange. There has been no official word on this matter from anyone who runs the exchange.

The idea behind Sharecoin was an interesting one, and it was advertised as “The only coin backed by a real business”, the real business being Sharexcoin, an altcoin exchange that listed mostly new coins on its exchange. It was designed to be a Proof of Stake with a 30% stake per year. However, through the revenues generated at the Sharexcoin exchange, the owner promised to give people who ‘lock in’ their Sharecoin for 30 days, an equivalent of 60% stake per year, twice of what you would get in your wallet.

Sharexcoin was pretty popular for new altcoins, like Energycoin and more recently Qora. It appears that there was a huge trading volume for Qora on Sharexcoin before it went down.

Exchanges like these give the whole space a bad name, and it appears, for all intents and purposes that Sharexcoin is a scam exchange that ran away with all the depositors’ coins. There has been no communication from the owner of any other possible theories. It goes without saying that people are angry and disappointed with yet another exchange closing down.

Did you lose money on Sharexcoin?