Bitcoin Forum

We have decided to sell Coinnext because we sadly don't have the time and resources anymore to maintain and grow it beyond this point.
Coinnext is launched May 7th, we have heavily marketed this product since then. Our SEO, while far from it's potential, is growing quickly.

Traffic from May 7, 2014 to Jun 17, 2014

• Sessions: 39,312
• Unique visitors: 18,174
• Avg session duration: 00:05:43
• Around 70% of all this traffic is completely free. (21% of all sessions is through Bitcointalk, 20% is direct, 12% is through google, 3% is through reddit, 2% is through twitter, ...)

What is up for auction?

• The brand Coinnext, professional designed branding with a perfect reputation. We never got hacked.
• The domain name Coinnext.com
• Social Media accounts; Reddit, Facebook & Twitter (300+ genuine followers).
• Coinnext Community accounts on all the community boards that we registered.
• 1,600+ registered and email verified users, we're currently adding about 20 new users per day.
• 1,387 people registered to our newsletter
• 3th party software accounts, such as our helpdesk, software tools (github, ..), monitoring tools. This is optional and we will gladly help you move to other software of your preference free of charge.
• The front-end;
  -- Automated deposit / withdraw system including anti-fraud detection that will stop withdrawals that are suspicious or found fraudulent.
  -- Easy to add/remove coins
  -- Integrated Chatbox
  -- Highly responsive single page trading page
  -- Professional designed UI
  -- Admin back-end. Disable/enable markets, lookup user/transaction data, ...
• The back-end
  -- Custom built, cryptocurrency specific trading engine.
  -- We have separate servers for providing the web interface, servers for the exchange and servers to hold all the funds. We have 3 different coin servers, higher risk coins are separated from the Bitcoin server.
  

Technical; the site is built on Node.js and using a MySQL database for storage.
A safe exchange is everything but easy to make. We've carefully developed it over the span of 6 months with absolute security in mind. Where other exchanges hired VC funding and employed complete teams, we made ours from scratch with only two.

Monthly Costs: total servers cost is around 500$ per month.
We pay a few misc. bills like github / helpdesk but these are all relatively low and completely optional.

While everything is setup, ready and working near perfection, you will need development skills or people with development skills involved to make this a success. Please consider this when bidding.

Starting bid: 10 BTC
Buy it now: 50 BTC
End date and time: June 30th
Payment methods accepted: Bitcoin / Litecoin

The person who refers us to the final buyer is offered 10% of the selling price. So if you know someone who might be interested, let them know.

Any current revenue figures?

We have a 3 month promotion to charge 0% fees ongoing. So no revenue is currently made.

Ouch. To risky for me to consider, would be in the hole nearly 10k by the time you could even start making revenue, and Im assuming this part, "Total Volume:1.6504 BTC
Total Trades:5705"
is lifetime trades, because when I checked a couple hours ago it was 5703 trades.

Site looks very nice, just I can't see it making a profit. Say you charge a .15% fee each way (like mintpal), so .3% on every transaction, and you get 1000BTC a month in volume (~605x current volume), that would be 3BTC generated in fees. After server fees, your down to ~2BTC, which doesn't leave much for hiring white hatters and marketing.

I love the way the site looks, just can't see it turning a profit  :-\

Goodluck selling!

The site could currently easily handle 1000 BTC per DAY volume, it's even really doable to reach that amount (mostly by adding new coins aggressively).
1000 BTC per month would be only 33 BTC per day, that is not so much. I think our pricing is very reasonable and inline with what we offer. For the right entrepreneur this is a very good deal. If you are looking for a passive income site, indeed, this is not for you.

The software might be able to handle 1000BTC per day, and no, its not doable at this stage in the game. There are many exchanges, yet mintpal, bter, and cryptsy have managed to control nearly the entire marketshare. Its not realistic to assume to 1000BTC. Any new BTC based exchanges realistic customer base will be that of pump & dumps.

Again, wish you best of luck, but when your selling a business it doesn't matter what it could do, it matters what it does bring in

Again, what it brings is clearly outlined in the original post. I priced it appropriately to what's outlined there. If it would be at the point of 1000 BTC per day, it would not be for sale for starting from 10 BTC. I also clearly stated for you once again that this is not intended as a passive income website and valuing it as such is just idiotic. This is a project for a bitcoin entrepreneur who has the resources and time to follow up on the startup journey.

We had a great start and we have great running platform; that is what's for sale. I'm not selling a 1000 BTC/day business here, I think that is pretty clear to almost everyone here.

Really like it, but at 10btc thats outrageous. You guys kvervalued yourselves

Are you serious? 6000 USD? You know we charge 400 USD/day to develop/design for our clients? You know creating a platform such as we currently have will take you at least 3 months and probably more towards 6 months. On top ours is tested by several security firms and above all has been live and trading for 1 month successfully. If you don't think that is worth 6000 USD at the minimum, you are overvaluing your intelligence.

It's not like we are the last exchange ever in existence. There are many entrepreneurs who do have the time and resources to follow up on an exchange project. For them this is an absolute steal.

50 BTC for no revenue... how did you come up with that validation?

Good job scaring away potential customers. I wish you luck upon finding a daring investor to invest in a business with a record of 0 returns. Nice. 2btc daily volume, yet you expect it can easily rise 500x by "adding new coins aggresively" which would result in you also being accused of adding scam coins which in turn leaves a bad reputation which in turn reduces users which in turn reduces volume and so on and so on. Good luck, seriously youre gonna need it.

I'm going to stand up for him, and say that this is a fair price for it. The platform looks fairly good (I have no idea about its performance).

With some aggressive marketing it could certainly could turn a reasonable profit. Certainly enough to be a full time job for one person.

(Although I would want to get if for 10btc if I were interested)

I also to think its a good platform, If I had the capital to buy it I would...

How did I scare customers away? I've been nothing but straight forward. I never said it's easy to rise 500x, kind of lame of you to claim that, and I dare you to quote me on that. I said it's doable and that the best way we found to grow the site, ROI wise, is adding new coins aggressively. Then on top you proceed to make your own future projections based on nothing but your instinct. I'm sorry but if there is someone scaring "customers" away it is you with FUD.

Write 100 skilled developers / developer companies (not off-shore, the quality they can provide is just not sufficient for a financial exchange that is supposed to hold up to millions of user funds) and ask for a quote of a project similar that we have. Let me know the average quote price.

Optionally, you can also add the price of the security team we hired (and every exchange should) to completely audit our app. The price of the custom branding / UI if you were to hire someone for that, I can continue.. We are also beyond a software project, we are a brand that is out there in the market, live and successfully trading for over month, which is the best proof of concept you could ask for to judge software.

A few questions:

1) What is the process to add another coin on the exchange?
2) How is the wallet security being handled?
3) What development skill is needed? What framework is the platform written on?



Thank you

1) You would need to compile the coin from its github source, this is technically not so hard but requires a small learning process, it could also easily outsourced by anyone. After that put the wallet on our server and we have made a script that easily adds the markets and necessary variables everywhere. Although we made it as easy as possible, this is still something that I strongly advice a developer does however.
2) Our coin wallets are divided over 3 separated servers, high value coins like BTC and LTC reside on one, while brand-new untested coins reside on another. Only the trading engine can access these wallet servers, and only the front-end server can access the trading engine.
We keep over 90% of funds in cold storage, for BTC we use Armory for that. We have a fraud-checker in place that will scan every withdrawal request for abnormalities and block the payout for manual processing if need be. Basically we have covered every trick in the book to maximize our user funds safety.
3) The platform is written on Node.js using Express. A developer with sufficient knowledge of javascript would be necessary to develop new features.

Ok but this is not how valuation of a company is computed, valuation of a company is based on revenue not how much you put into building the site. Do you have at least have some users?

It looks like they do, they got a chatbox and there is chatter.

I am more concern with how many of those users have deposited money on the service and are using it.

If this helps any it says

The front end looks very nice and impressive. Cost is a little step and monthly profit from fee will not cover operation cost for a while.

Gweedo, if you are interested to take over and want to reduce the risk. I am willing to take a small equity stake with partial shareholder right.

Now this is a GREAT IDEA.

If someone draws up good terms, and I can throw in for a group buy.

i'd be happy with a group buy.

Gweedo would you be willing to the dev? I got a IPO going for it.

I can dev for a little bit, but I really would rather put money up and be a capital partner.

Would you be interested in getting in on a project like this?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=656861.0

You responded to my other, looking for a team post. And this just seems to fall right in line with it to be honest.

I would have to read about it.

The IPO is too expensive with little value added from this auction.

Look. Yes, the software is worth more than the opening bid. That doesn't mean shit. People aren't looking to buy the software, they are looking to buy the business. The fact is, is that its a saturated market and that this will not make money at 10BTC. The amount of money that would have to be spent on marketing would be insane. And you say that the exchange hasn't been hacked? Thats because no one has heard of it! The volume is so little no one will spend their time trying to hack it. If this ever gets up there in volume, maintaining security on the site would be a huge issue.

Im sorry, but this is a massive money pit.

I'm going to disagree with you. If you're clever you will certainly be able to make this a profitable business.

I would take part in this myself, but obviously working on a similar project.

You could make this profitable, thats not the question. The question is how much money do you have to throw at this to make it profitable? This is a huge money sink.

Current volume is ~1.6BTC at day. Say they finally start charging fees, they would make ~$85 a month in fees. Thats a net loss of $415 from just server fee's alone. Your in the hole right off the bat.

They have 0 marketing from as far as I can tell to, so the name is really not worth much.

We actually have been very active marketing wise. We have several advertising campaigns (around 20) running and already pre-paid for (probably around 2K USD total). Around 30% of our visitors are coming through some kind of payed campaign, so that's actually quite reasonable.

A few that pop to mind (there are many more)
cryptocoincharts.info
cryptocointalk.com
altcoincalendar.info
cryptocoinsnews.com
coinmarketcap.com

We've partnered with coin developers and have given away around 1-2 BTC worth of free comps. That's a major acquisition channel as well.
We also have been highly active on twitter since day one, and have currently 331 genuine followers.

Most of the marketing we did however is free. We are currently visible in every community of each coin we have in our market (bitcointalk/reddit/twitter/forum/cryptocointalk).

There is probably more I forget to mention now, but the baseline is that on the contrary we have been highly active in the marketing departement.

Currently exactly 1,729+ registered and email verified users. (Note how when I posted this topic less than 24h ago, we only had 1600ish).
Over 90% of those users have deposited coins.

I actually got an email from a pretty awesome Bitcoin hosting provider, asking us not to sell and willing to give us free hosting of all our servers to allow us to continue growing without constraints, really a very attractive offer. I think they might be willing to do the same for the buyer so I can always refer the buyer to them.
However if $400 per month is a scary lot for you, this might not be the best project to take over, this is really not just a website but a real startup.

One thing to consider which im sure many of you haven't, what if the exchange gets hacked and a lot of funds go missing?

All those that join the group buy could be joint liable for the missing funds.

Wouldn't be the first or last time its happened.

1) You're not liable

2) Raise enough funds for a security audit of the code, and servers. As well as a crowdcurity campaign.

I believe this site has already been checked by crowdcurity


In regards to the OP:
Even with a few thousand in advertising and a good platform, and 0% fee's you are unable to get daily volume over a single bitcoin and change. Do you see why this is worrisome? Huge. Huge. Moneypit.

We actually already did all of that, we've also run an active crowdcurity campaign and payed a few hundred USD in bounties.

Well actually 70% of our traffic is free traffic that comes from coin communities such as this one, we chose to also have a certain budget for payed advertising, but that doesn't make it a moneypit, this is something that we were going to calculate and the future owner should as well, if an ad is ROI you keep it otherwise you don't renew it. Either way, current ads are all payed for and come with the sale.

About volume, I am not going to sugarcoat it, our volume is very low. But our sale price is priced accordingly low as well, I am not making any profit by this sale, so I'm not trying to "fool" anyone here. We either find someone to take it over or we will close it down.

To increase volume, the truth is that after 1 month in operation you can't expect more then what we currently have. Having 1700+ users deposited and trading on a bugfree platform, even if it's for satoshis, is an okay result for our first month.
I suspect it will take between 3-6 months to get to a point of decent volume. That is at least how long approx. other exchanges before us took (I monitored this a lot over the last 6 months).

We have had several days with volume nearing 4-5 BTC, a few even were we got to 10 BTC (certain coin launches and days when there was general a high volume on exchanges, basically when coin markets are bullish trading traffic increases/when bearish they drop). The total volume on the front page, if that is your source, resets every day.

I'm just going to put it out there once again, with the right management you could easily become the next mintpal/cryptsy whatever with this. Its really just about what you can do as support/admin.

Im sorry, but you could not "easily" be the next mintpal / crypty etc. They are established and have been around for over a year. People trust them. This market is saturated. There will be no more big altcoin markets. Even crypto-trade which offers securities / vouchers / altcoin exchange / and Fiat currency support has struggled to get any volume. People go where there is volume. Have no volume, your screwed. The fact that your still at 1.6BTC daily volume after months of 0% fee's and having a userbase of ~1700 users shows that its not going anywhere. No one will place a buy or sell order if it appears that it will never be fulfilled. Altcoins skyrocket and crash quickly, they go where there is volume. There is good volume with Bter, crypsty, mintpal, thats why people go there, because they know their buy/sell orders will be taken care of in a reasonable timeframe.

Im sorry, but this is a money pit. I understand you are not going to make a profit on this, never accused you of that, your likely going to take a loss.


Goodluck with your auction, and goodluck to any future owner. You will need it.

With enough capital you can supply volume, then if you have lets say 10 buyers you can get a considerable amount of traffic just from signatures on the forum.

You just have to excel where others fail, so for example implement full cryptographic proof of reserves on all coins, as well as multi sig cold storage. Provide good customer support (live chat isn't being done on many alt coin exchanges).

Supplying volume to your own exchange is basically the same thing as faking the volume... Also known as fraud. Excel where others fail? Lets be honest, no one cares about live chat if theres no volume, same goes to cold storage / proof of reserves.

No, providing volume is not faking volume. It is running your own trading bots with 0 fee trading to reduce the spread. That is fine to do. In fact, a very positive thing for all users.

You should not be trading on your own exchange

You should not be trading on your own exchange if you are giving your trades priority over others, manipulating the markets or doing anything else shady.

I would like to welcome you to point out how providing liquidity and reducing the spread in a market harms its users. We're not talking about ghost orders, or orders not backed by funds but genuine orders to beef up the order books and reduce the spread.

Operating an exchange should be that. Operating, not using. Whats wrong with it, is it effects the prices on the exchange by buying / selling orders, thus in a way "fixes" prices.

No, it doesn't. If you are running a spread trading bot it just does, just that. tightens the spread.

Someone should buy this, put together a management team, raise revenue through selling shares and kick some ass.

I'd buy shares.

I am check the securities section  ;).

Hi,

is there a API?

https://coinnext.com/API

https://coinnext.com/api

I am going to lower the buy now price to 15 BTC. I think it's fair to say that there has been little interest so far from this community to run an exchange.
In addition, if the auction has not received an official bid before the 22nth, I will prematurely close down the auction and consequently take measures to shut down the service gracefully. After that the codebase is still for sale by PM, however non-exclusively and with no users/branding/marketing/servers.

Lower min bid, 10BTC is to high for the current market

The process of sealing the deal and transferring everything is not worth less than 10 BTC to me. I'm basically giving it away for 10 BTC, if that is too much for a buyer, it's just not a suited business for that buyer. Perhaps for the source code a lower price can be justified, but that is not on the table until this auction ends.

Its not worth 10BTC, you will likely be able to get a buyer(s if you decide to sell to multiple people) for the source code at a lower price

It is worth more, you know that is only 6000$ right, I'm not going to explain multiple times exactly why, just check my posts again and wether you agree or not, please respect my bid.
I do understand that this is a mixed crowd, a lot with very limited resources and only looking to make a quick buck, preferably on a passive income website. As I mentioned before, a project such as a financial exchange is obviously not for those. If I had the option to target only the resourceful and entrepreneurial members with this topic, I would, sadly that's not the way a forum works.

I understand where you are coming from.  It always sucks when you put a lot of time and money into something, only to find out it didn't work.  You still feel that it is worth a lot, even though, these things are worth what people will pay for them. 
I actually really like your site.  If your minimum bid were substantially lower, I would even take a flier on it myself.  But the fact is, this is highly speculative.  It is very unlikely to ever make any money no matter how much time\money is sunk into it, and as such there is no way it justifies the price you are looking for. 
At the end of the day, no one cares how much time or effort you spent on the business.  All we care about is the revenue (there is none), the brand (there is none) the customer base (there is none) and the market, which at the moment is super saturated and dominated by larger players. 
It has nothing to do with us being "cheap".  Don't take my word for it, just go over to places like flippa and see what businesses with no revenue and no customer base are worth to get a more realistic idea of what you have here. 

It does suck, but sadly we are quitting for different reasons, which remain private. If you suggest I'm pricing this irrationally, you are mistaken. I put the exchange up for auction here, just for the off chance that someone similar to us is/wants to build an exchange, he/she could save a hell of a lot of time while getting the best quality software he could ever wish for, professionally designed, tested and successfully running.

To clarify once more, I have no intends to sell for less, the price is beyond fair and if you don't see that, I'm sorry this is not for you. I know you will not change your opinion, so I won't even try to. I am not desperate to sell, and believe it or not, the main reason we want to is to avoid telling our users (we actually do have quite some already) they can no longer store their coins with us. We are already past the point that selling is actually much less work then shutting down.

Again, this auction will close on 22nd if no bid is received, and the site will shut down gracefully over a period of several weeks.

I think closing it down would be a horrible waste, should just keep controlling interest in it and turn it over. If they do not run it up to par you can take it back over plain and simple. At least this way you have a chance to recoup your money instead of just kissing it good bye.

They lose money every month on it, closing down would be a sensible thing to do. More sensible would be to sell cheaper. Its better to get something than nothing.

And yes, the software etc is all worth more than the opening bid. Except that your buying a business, not a custom script. Thus you sell at what the business is worth, not what you paid for it

Your logic doesn't make any sense, you agree the software is worth more stand-alone, but that same software tested and running live/doing trades/having around 500 free visits daily/getting around 20 users daily is somehow worth less? On the contrary the software stand-alone would actually be worth less, although not by much as I've priced this auction very competitively already.
Also, we did not just buy a "custom script" as you suggest, I thought it was clear we are engineers by trade who made everything from the ground up and completely tailored to cryptocurrencies.
I think it's fair to say you are not interested AcoinLLC, you seem someone who invests in small businesses expecting a steady, mostly passive return. Running a financial exchange is obviously not something for you, it's a very serious project to take on I really want to warn people for that, this is really not something that can be approached like you do small businesses. We can argue all day about what you think is a fair price but it's really rather pointless.

To take on project on this scale, the person/business buying it would need a development team and marketing team on board.

I would jump on board if I have a team of people with me. Sadly, I don't.


Judging from various posts here, I seriously doubt you can find people with the mindset to take on project this scale. Most people here just trying to find quick buck.

No, I don't think you understand. The site itself would cost more money than the opening bid to get something at where it is. Thats irrelevant. Its not worth that much to a buyer, because its not a profitable business. Im going to make the comparison to purchasing miners when its not profitable, if the average price of a GH is $5, and you buy them for $4, thats great. But if each GH will only ever make you $3, its still not worth buying. You have 0 revenue, and are in the whole thousands after a few months. You don't sell a business off of potential, if you wanted to get more money, you should have built a history of the site actually earning cash.

Maybe we should all team-up and try and launch this puppy properly :)

Have you done any sort of automated stress testing to test the upper thresholds for simultaneous users and trades executed at one time?

Maximum # of coins, users and trades/sec. capable of being executed on what kind of hardware type of data?

I been watching the site looks like someone is injecting coins into it.

As I've announced, no bids were received prior to 22nth, this auction is now closed

Is this going to be offered again in the future? 

I just saw this thread for the first time, and I am interested. 

Pm the poster.

Pretty sure he won't turn off a chance to sell.

I got a reply from the OP.   I have passed on this deal.   If the code were open source, I would have been more interested and I would have continued to negotiate on a price.  But being that the source is not open, it is too risky and difficult to maintain.
I need to be able to hire my own developer to inspect the code for leaks, or unauthorized gateways, and I need to be able to have my own developer maintain the site for me.   I don't trust third parties.

If there are any developers out there that want to work on this with me.  I need an exchange platform that deals with fiat deposits and withdraws, and has the ability to add alt coins on the fly.  I am working on the legal stuff right now.

Thanks!

Everyone is going to tell you the same thing they have told me, since I suggest the same exact type of exchange... Markets flooded, the market resistance is to strong.

While do not agree that is the majority of the board member opinion.

Goodluck with the "legal" stuff if you want to accept US customers in all 50 US states, Crypsty is running into problems getting it done. If you want to spend 6 figures on getting an exchange up and running that accepts fiat, kudos to you, and hopefully you make your money back, but you would have to convince people to not use any of the competitors that they trust and have been using since alt-coin exchanges became a thing.

There are a few things that will help in this process.  I will reveal some of the legal avenues that I have discovered soon, after I meet with my lawyer.

In my opinion, healthy competition is good for everyone!

Im sorry, but there's no shortcuts when running a fiat exchange and accepting US customers unless you want to be shutdown. I wish you the best of luck, but I will still be using crypsty and mintpal as my 2 exchanges as they have proven they are legitimate exchanges, and already have great liquidity. If you can accept forms of fiat (such as paypal, voucher codes etc) instead of traditional banking, I would use your exchange as I try to avoid banks as much as possible  ::)

Ya I have no intention on breaking any laws.  I pay a pretty good lawyer for advice, and I have just learned a few things that I need to run by him.   But I think with the capital that I have, and with the right adviser, this could be a good thing.

Crypto is still in its beginning stages, there is a lot of room for new services.

Don't worry dude, It can be done. I wish more people were supportive on this board and gave word of advice and not make it sound like it could never happen. Apply for a MSB find a company you can umbrella under for your MST's and you will be fine.

I am not normally a debbie downer but this is just not a profitable business to get into. Especially if you want to accept fiat deposits. This exchange which had a decent team behind it and nearly 2000 users wasn't able to break 2BTC daily trading volume.

Im in it for the long term.   Even if 2BTC is all of the trading volume I get, it would be roughly as profitable as a ASIC miner.
But beyond just the exchange part of this, I have developed an idea to expand the purposes and usefulness of a platform such as this.

Sorry to read your site will be closing soon. It looks like a great site. I hope you can sell it at the price you are asking for. What will be next? Do you already have plans?

The problem is how would he find a company willing to do that?

I am confused.  Is this auction ending on June 30th?  Or June 22nd? 
The OP says that it ends on June 30th.

If this auction is still on until June 30th.  Here is my proposition.

I bid 10 BTC.  I require that I own exclusively the source code, and I can do what I wish with it.
If I get the source code, the exclusive rights, and the github account for this source, the domain "coinnext.com", the website, the customer base, the current transactions, etc.   Based on these conditions, my bid for 10BTC is good.  We must use btcrow.com for the transaction.   (I will pay for escrow fees)

I wrote the author of this post and we had some negotiations going, but I haven't heard back from them yet.

So this is my public offer.   Please PM me to settle up.

read threw the post he called it off long ago

This auction is closed since the 22nd of June, the exchange as offered in OP is no longer available for sale. The source code stand-alone can still be purchased for non-exclusive use at a lower price in private, however we will never sell or auction this offer publicly after this point. Thank you all for the interest.