Building a better BLOX

As most of you are aware, BLOX has not been functioning the way it should in the last 30 days. While the app has been stable for 98%+ of the time, it was during peak loads that users were unable to sign in or place a trade.

These peak loads are often coincided with enormous price movements and are thus the most important times. We would like to share our perspective of this period and also let you know how we’re going to improve upon things.

But first we feel it is important to share the origin story of BLOX, to let you guys know where we’re coming from.

The start of BLOX

Our journey started almost 8 years ago when we launched the first version of BTC Direct, which grew out to become one of Europe’s leading non-custodial crypto brokers. It’s been our mission from day one, to make bitcoin and other crypto assets as easily available as we could possibly make it. ‘Not your keys, not your coins’ is the famous crypto adage and we always stayed true to it.

However, we also noticed that a lot of people did not want to take on the responsibility and hassle of self custody. Since we are fully invested in making crypto a success we decided to build a new service that would remove all technical hurdles and friction for people to join the crypto economy. Over the course of 18 months we built the mobile app that we later named BLOX.

The growth of BLOX

BLOX is designed to be a user-friendly mobile app, that allows for everyone between the ages of 18–99 to easily buy, sell and trade cryptocurrencies.

The first months of our existence we noticed mild interest in it. But by improving upon our UX, the rising bitcoin price and our media campaign we saw an enormous influx of new users. It’s been a big honour to help onboard so many new people into the crypto ecosystem. This newfound success also brings a lot of responsibility with it. Part of that responsibility is maintaining a well functioning and stable running app, where trading is just one click away.

This last month haven’t been able to succeed in this. To put things into perspective–in these last 30 days:

• We’ve processed twice as many orders as in the entire 12 months prior
• There were days that we grew our total user base by 10%
• We ranked number one in the Apple App Store several days in a row in the category ‘Finance’
• We ranked as the sixth most downloaded app overall in the Netherlands

Looking back, this was more than we expected ánd could handle. We ran into several issues, most notably:

• Users were unable to sign in
• Orders weren’t processing instantly
• Deposits took longer to credit
• Our support team got overwhelmed and is currently looking at a backlog of ~5k tickets

User feedback

Of course, this led to a tidal wave of complaints, questions and inquiries. We want to say that we understand you and the frustration that you might have. This is not what BLOX represents and not what we want for you. Some people suggested that we benefited from this downtime during extreme price movements. This is, of course, not the case. Our business model is based on charging a small fee for each transaction. When we are unable to process transactions we are not making any money either.
So now over to the most important part.

What we are doing to improve

To provide you, our user, with a better user experience, we are committed to work night and day, seven days a week on BLOX.

For now this means:

• We have put a temporary stop on new user registrations. We are fully dedicated to our current users and want to make sure that we can offer them the service they deserve before we open up to new users again.
• We have been able to identify a number of bottlenecks which we are currently addressing. Although we would love to fix this overnight, this takes time and real human effort, and we are on it.
• We are continuously working on stabilising the app experience. This means we are scaling our application both vertically and horizontally.
• We are and will continue to invest in the best IT-talent. Are you an engineer and would like to work in crypto? Check out our careers page.
• We are growing our customer support team. We will continue to add more people to make sure everyone receives a response in a timely manner.
• We are going to communicate more often on our Twitter account‘BLOX Maintenance’, and schedule planned maintenance mode during the night as much as possible.
• We may be raising the minimum euro amount per order to 5 euro. This should decrease the amount of small orders and therefore decrease the overall load.

For now

Thank you for providing us with feedback about BLOX and thank you for your patience and understanding. We will continue to work hard to make BLOX the trading experience that you deserve.

We know that this post will not address every question that our users might have. So we will try our best to address these in several other blog posts that we will release in the coming days.

We’ll keep you posted.