Romania’s oldest Bitcoin Exchange, BTCxChange, which was founded in 2014, has announced that it will have to shut down on 1 May 2018. Visitors to its website are currently greeted by this message:

The move follows the closure of the firm’s accounts at Idea Bank in February (having received notice of this closure on January 22nd). This was, according to BTCxChange, the fourth bank account they had lost in the previous 12 months, and it decided that enough was enough, and that it was not going to look for another bank. So the firm notified the exchange’s users that fiat deposits and withdrawls could only be processed up to February 1st, and that after this date, only bitcoin withdrawls would be possible.

At the end of January, the firm’s CEO, Max Nicula, wrote a letter to the exchange’s customers. Here is how he expressed his frustration with the banking system:

The banking system looks like a dinosaur cannibalizing itself since the bank is no longer a service provider but a privilege that can be taken at any time. Who will become the winner, in the end, time will show, but from our point of view, the banking system starts decomposing and there are only 2 questions that matter: 1) how long this process will take and 2) how much bad smell will be produced in the process.

The Romanian central bank, the National Bank of Romania (BNR), announced on 6 February 2018 that it discouraged the involvement of the local banks in the cryptocurrency sector due to the extreme volatility of cryptocurrencies. On the same day, Agustín Carstens, the General Manager for the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) warned central banks about the risks of cryptocurrencies to financial stability. In particular, he called Bitcoin a “combination of a bubble, a Ponzi scheme and an environmental disaster.”

Approximately, two weeks after BNR’s warning, according to local news outlet Ziarul Financiar, another large Romanian crypto exchange, CryptoCoin Pro, lost access to its Romanian bank accounts. The exchange’s CEO, Valentin Socaci, made the following statement at the time: ” We tried to talk with 90% of the banks we found in Bucharest, but we did not manage to operate with any of them.”