Purse is being Acquired and Sunsetting the Current Marketplace

Dear PurseIO, Inc. Users,

We are happy to announce that Purse is being acquired by Loadpipe. With this acquisition, we’re modernizing the marketplace with Web3 capabilities to revolutionize global commerce. To facilitate this transition, we will sunset our current “shop on Amazon” model and focus resources on developing Loadpipe protocol.

Company History

Purse.io was launched in 2014 with the aim of providing a platform to shop on Amazon at a discount using Bitcoin. Our mission has been to build use cases beyond just trading and speculating on bitcoin. The marketplace gained traction early on when “crypto” was just bitcoin and people were eager to use bitcoin as a medium of exchange.

In 2015–16, we invested in improving bitcoin infrastructure to accommodate different use cases for bitcoin and launched bcoin, an open source bitcoin implementation written in node.js. Initially, we envisioned using bcoin to enable smart contracts and layer 2 solutions. For better or worse, there was resistance from the development community to changes to the protocol. Crypto narratives continued to evolve, fragmenting the ecosystem thousands of different coins and tokens.

In 2017–20, we started thinking about use cases for blockchain that bitcoin couldn’t support. We teamed up with other companies we admired in the ecosystem and launched Handshake, a decentralized network for naming and certificate authority.

Meanwhile, on the marketplace, we continued operating purse.io serving many unbanked bitcoiners. We integrated Lightning Network for faster and cheaper transactions. In the end though, it became increasingly difficult to scale the marketplace beyond novelty use cases, all the while keeping up with the hardships of working with Amazon. As a result, we are sunsetting the current marketplace.

Timeline of Events

• July 3rd 2023: New registrations will be disabled and order creation will be discontinued.
• August 10th, 2023: We will continue to offer user support for ongoing orders in escrow until this date. Please ensure all transactions are settled and items delivered before this date
• After August 10th, 2023: Our platform will only allow user withdrawals. If you have a balance on purse.io, please plan to withdraw all funds as soon as possible.
• Beginning September 20th, 2023: We will enforce Know-Your-Customer (KYC) requirements for all remaining withdrawals. Please see https://support.purse.io/en/article/kyc-requirements-hd7p9x/ for more information on KYC procedures.

This transition marks a significant milestone in our journey. It has been our privilege to serve people around the world, and we’re humbled by the continuous support of our community. We’re grateful to everyone who has used purse.io, contributing to bitcoin’s utility and distribution. As we usher in this exciting new chapter, we look forward to bringing you an even better shopping experience

Thank you for your support!