In a Reddit post, the cryptocurrency micropayment service TipJar announced that the company would shut down their website after six months. The post also urged the company’s customers to withdraw any funds on their accounts before the website is taken down.
TripJar is primarily an Ethereum-based micropayment service that allows Redditors to send cryptocurrency funds to each other in Ethereum (ETH)trade and ERC-20 tokens. The services of the company had been stopped on October 7 but the website will be taken down completely on April 10, 2020.
The post mentions that the management of TripJar has been paying for the server fees for many months now and since a lot of the services that the company offers are unused it makes little sense to continue operating them. Lack of interest from the Redditors is seen as a major reason that has led to the shutdown.
The post also mentions that the development team of the company had often been asked to make the code of the web application open-source but the founder was always hesitant since it could allow some third-party to replicate their entire idea and move forward with their own business plan without crediting the company. But now, after the complete shutdown, TripJar plans to release the code online for usage.
Furthermore, the post brought to attention some key developments that are to take place in lieu of the announcement:
- TripJar subreddit’s bot will be de-operationalized so users will not be able to send funds to other users.
- Almost six months later, the website will be taken down.
- Before the website is taken down, the users should withdraw any crypto funds that they own through their accounts.
Unsuccessful Crypto Micropayment Model
The company was created back in 2017 as a payment solution that allowed social media users to send payments to other Redditors using various cryptocurrencies. But for the most part, the business never really materialized and didn’t produce any significant profits since the use case was very limited and gradually the service started to see decline in its active subscriptions.
ChangeTip, a fellow micropayment service also announced shutdown in 2016 when a number of workers from ChangeTip were hired by Airbnb and left the management of ChangeTip with little chance of survival.
It seems that crypto micropayment solutions are not very popular among social media users. Recently, Coinexchange was also shut down because low trading volumes and higher maintenance costs for providing the security and support to the customers.
