Colored Bitcoin Exchange Coinprism is Shutting Down
Another crypto exchange bites the dust after being denied basic banking services. | Source: Shutterstock
Users on the Coinprism platform have until March 31 to withdraw funds and redirect them to another wallet or export private keys. Dublin-based Coinprism, a wallet service founded in 2014 as an early blockchain startup, is closing down, according to an alert on the company’s website. Both the Coinprism block explorer and the Coinprism API will be closed. According to the company, technology has evolved since their launch, making their offering obsolete in light of Ethereum ERC-20-based tokens, which drive many ICO tokens.
Users who hold funds in a Coinprism wallet are being advised by the startup to transfer their bitcoin and colored coins out of Coinprism and into another wallet — or export their private keys — by the end of the first quarter, according to an email obtained by CCN.com.
Coinprism was a platform fueled by a colored bitcoin wallet for the trading of digital assets, founded by Flavien Charlon. In the email, Coinprism offers some solace to its users, reminding them that bitcoin and colored-coin funds are independent of the Coinprism platform and instead reside on the blockchain. As a result, they will not disappear alongside the Coinprism exchange.
But the bitcoin and colored-coin funds can’t be accessed without the use of a private key, and as a result, Coinprism is imploring users to export them.
- Coinprism users should visit this page to begin the bitcoin export process
- Next, reimport them or “sweep them into a bitcoin-compatible wallet” (the process similarly works for forked coins including bitcoin cash)
- To keep color coin assets, you need an open-asset compatible wallet. Coinprism recommends Colorecore.
Meanwhile, the latest block transaction on the Coinprism website is dated for Feb. 11, 2018. But when attempting to create a Coinprism wallet, we were brought to a page informing users of the impending shutdown.
The Coinprism Platform
Coinprism used “colorized” bitcoin to represent any asset that the user wanted to trade — ranging from equity shares to a vehicle, gold or even a home — on a blockchain-agnostic platform. The now-defunct company likened its color-coded digital coin system to the HTTP protocol of the internet, adding another layer to bitcoin that it said bolstered the applications for the cryptocurrency.
The writing may have been on the wall, with the startup not having updated its blog since 2016 and the latest tweets dating back to that year as well. Coinprism’s Flavian has already moved onto greener pastures, according to his LinkedIn profile, with the launch of Trezeo, which is a gig economy platform by which freelancers get paid. In its heydey, Coinprism had inked a partnership with the likes of Microsoft’s Azure.
A Reddit user saw some red flags as much as a year ago when they were exploring various colored-coin companies.
Other anecdotal feedback from Reddit users was that Coinprism customer service was “lacking” and that developers had abandoned its Open Assets protocol.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
