Wyre Shuts Down Amid Bear Market Pressures

After almost a decade in business, San Francisco-based crypto payments company Wyre is winding down, citing the financial challenges of the bear market and not any hawkish “regulatory agency direction” in the United States.

In a blog post published on June 16, the company explained that it made the difficult decision to cease operations to “protect the best interests of our key stakeholders and customers.”

“Wyre continues to protect client assets. If you have assets on the Wyre platform, you can continue withdrawing them until Friday, July 14, via the Wyre dashboard.

“After that, we will have a separate procedure to recover any remaining assets on the platform,” the company explained.

“If you are interested in acquiring Wyre’s or its subsidiaries’ assets, please contact 88 Partners,” the Wyre team stated, implying that the company’s assets are now for sale.

Since September 2022, when one-click checkout company Bolt canceled its intentions to acquire Wyre for $1.5 billion, it has reportedly been circling the drain.

A few months later, fiat-to-crypto on-ramp solution provider Juno advised its users on January 4 to move their crypto assets off the Juno platform and into self-custody, citing “uncertainty” regarding its custodial partner Wyre.

The next day, MetaMask also discontinued support for Wyre’s cryptocurrency payment services due to the same issue.

A few days later, Wyre imposed a 90% withdrawal cap on all its users but promptly lifted it on January 13 after obtaining funding from an unnamed “strategic partner,” indicating that the company was on the mend.

Significantly, Wyre reportedly laid off 75 employees in January.

Wyre joins the growing list of crypto and blockchain companies and ventures that have succumbed to the pressure of a protracted bear market.

Due to crypto winter, the crypto fintech company Unbanked, the Lightning Network payments platform BottlePay, the crypto exchange HotBit, the NFT platform Terressa, and the institutional trading platform TradeBlock of Digital Currency Group all shut down in May alone.