Another one bites the dust: Nuri (formerly Bitwala)

[NotATether]

I'm sure many of you have heard about Bitwala, the banking app that lets you trade crypto as well - it's like Skrill or Payoneer. They haven't let new customers in for ages. Sometime last year they went through a complete redesign and rebranded themselves as Nuri.

Spoiler alert: If you see a crypto company redesigning their website and its not because they bought a slick domain (I'm looking at crypto.com), you can tell they are clearly struggling in the business.

They filed for bankruptcy in August 9, some months after the CeFi fallout. Their FAQ happily said, which I coincidentally checked just yesterday: "Q: Will you continue operations? A: Yes, we will keep operating" or words to that effect (I need to grab a Wayback Machine copy of this page for reference).

And now today they announced that they are shutting down: https://nuri.com/blog/letter-from-ceo/

This phase feels like a market correction for recklessly lending & borrowing companies.

[Bitcoin_Arena]

It was a price to pay for going down the path of shitcoin/Defi madness. The bear market is the time when projects that have been hanging by the thread and jump on to one hype to another in order to survive get exposed. Many more are going down the drain soon. Members should stay woke and keep their money off such platforms.

[DaveF]

Not the 1st and not the last of the crypto places that have fallen and will fall due to following the fad of the month club.

TANSSAAFL
There
Ain't
No
Such
Thing
As
A
Free
Lunch

When people go after the free easy money the only people they hurt is themselves, when businesses go after it, well we see implosion after implosion as they figure out that the money has to come from somewhere.

Altcoins, Tokens, DeFi, NFT, the cycle keeps repeating. Just the name changes.

-Dave

[PX-Z]

Finding and convincing investors for a crypto business is really tough especially in a long bearish season. Plus the kind of business operation they're doing following the short term hype of defi, NFT, and shitty altcoins. This is really just unfortunate.

[joniboini]

So many businesses go bankrupt in the bear market. I wonder if it's because the market itself is too small for small-medium players or if they just don't have a good plan to keep going on. At the same time, one or two projects that I followed since 2017 is still going strong even if their token doesn't do that well on the market. Hopefully, they don't go the same way.

[NotATether]

So many businesses go bankrupt in the bear market. I wonder if it's because the market itself is too small for small-medium players or if they just don't have a good plan to keep going on.

I'm going to bet on the latter. They just keep drinking Crimean wine thinking the bull market will last forever without a contingency plan in place in case the market becomes mega-bearish like it is now.

Nuri was funded by some EU grant so I'm pretty sure there were no investors that had an active role in the service's operations.

[Pmalek]

The positive thing is that Nuri (Bitwala) customers have access to their funds and according to the CEO's letter, they can withdraw their money until 18 December 2022. Not only that, but trading on the platform will also continue until the last day of November. Let's just hope that for the sake of the investors and users, that all that is true. Nuri is a business with German headquarters, so that instills some confidence at least.   

[DaveF]

The positive thing is that Nuri (Bitwala) customers have access to their funds and according to the CEO's letter, they can withdraw their money until 18 December 2022. Not only that, but trading on the platform will also continue until the last day of November. Let's just hope that for the sake of the investors and users, that all that is true. Nuri is a business with German headquarters, so that instills some confidence at least.   

The question is how and if did they let their customers know. Did they send 1 email that may or may not have wound up in their spam box, or have there been repeated attempts? Yes, the front page has the letter but if you had their login page bookmarked https://app.nuri.com/login there is nothing about it.

I have a few exchange accounts with some dust / small amounts in them. I don't read a lot of the mail that comes from them because most of it is crap. And now they are giving only 60 days to pull funds. Unless they are sending a lot of emails, I can see in early 2023 getting a lot of posts here from users that had small amounts that were just sitting there because it was only $xxx and it was not that big a deal. And now they can't get it.

Don't get me wrong, still way better then all the exchanges that disappeared in the middle of the night.
-Dave

[stomachgrowls]

It was a price to pay for going down the path of shitcoin/Defi madness. The bear market is the time when projects that have been hanging by the thread and jump on to one hype to another in order to survive get exposed. Many more are going down the drain soon. Members should stay woke and keep their money off such platforms.

This is the main problem that do commonly occur once the hype is over plus having this bear market then those business or projects which did really just jump on the hype would definitely be experiencing these things.

Not surprising that they would really be making out some alterations or changing if they do see currently that their ways  or methods arent that effective.

No company would really be having exemptions when it comes to failure, as long there's no demand then you would really be ending up on
biting on the dust which is really that common.

[livingfree]

This bear market really makes a lot of crypto business into punishment. But aren't these companies didn't prepare for it as they know how this market is very dynamic in terms of stability?

We can appreciate the way they handle their closure and it's typical that they should let their customers know that they're about to close. And those that don't check their accounts and wallets on nuri(bitwala) will miss the withdrawal period.

Trading is still until next month and by December 18, they'll be close and no more withdrawals but if there are still some funds from their customers that haven't withdrawn yet, some may ask or out of their good will to extend the date.

[o_e_l_e_o]

I flagged this up in my thread on the topic a few months ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5403254.msg60731947#msg60731947

I've got to say, props to Nuri for acting with honesty and integrity here. They've been open and transparent throughout, and have let customers continue to access their accounts and funds at all times. Compare with Celsius, who locked all accounts without warning and were still advertising deposit promotions <24 hours before they locked down. Looks like every user of Nuri should be able to withdraw their money, whereas all the users of Celsius are still fighting over scraps while it emerges the CEO cashed out about $45 million in the days prior to the bankruptcy.

At least millions of innocent users haven't lost everything in this particular case, but how depressing that the bar has been set that low. It is yet another warning that you should never be leaving coins with a third party.

-snip-

According to what I've read on Reddit (but can't confirm since I don't have an account), users are shown a notification as soon as they log in.

[dkbit98]

I'm sure many of you have heard about Bitwala, the banking app that lets you trade crypto as well - it's like Skrill or Payoneer. They haven't let new customers in for ages. Sometime last year they went through a complete redesign and rebranded themselves as Nuri.

No profit means no business for Nuri, and I never used them so I can't say more about them even when they had old name Biwala.
Imagine when you get co-funded by the Horizon 2020 programm for European Union and you get bankrupt few years later
I think that Skrill already partially supports Bitcoin, but does anyone know any other similar payment service that supports BTC payments?

At least millions of innocent users haven't lost everything in this particular case, but how depressing that the bar has been set that low. It is yet another warning that you should never be leaving coins with a third party.

I think that Nuri gambled a lot with shitcoins and leverage/yield trading investments, that is something that ruined many crypto related businesses in last few years of bear market, or maybe simply nobody really used their product.

[1miau]

Former Bitwala, recently Nuri (and now gone) has been playing shady games since a very long time. Because why would it be necessary to change their name? Right: because of a shady history, many bad reviews online and much more issues where people would rightfully stay away.
So, changing the name, doing the same BS again and of course - completely expectable - now going bankrupt.  
What a shitshow.

As someone from Germany I can tell you: these shady players like Nuri (Bitwala) are not beneficial at all. Even in Germany because BaFin (German SEC) doesn't care at all. Bitwala / Nuri and Co. are just hurting Bitcoin because of such shady practices...

[Bitstar_coin]

Former Bitwala, recently Nuri (and now gone) has been playing shady games since a very long time. Because why would it be necessary to change their name? Right: because of a shady history, many bad reviews online and much more issues where people would rightfully stay away.
So, changing the name, doing the same BS again and of course - completely expectable - now going bankrupt.  
What a shitshow.

As someone from Germany I can tell you: these shady players like Nuri (Bitwala) are not beneficial at all. Even in Germany because BaFin (German SEC) doesn't care at all. Bitwala / Nuri and Co. are just hurting Bitcoin because of such shady practices...

Very true, rebranding costs money and despite knowing the financial status of their business they still went ahead to do a rebranding, probably they were hoping for a huge influx of customers to miraculously change the situation.
I guess this is the same way most of them will end up if they refuse to be transparent with how they treat their customers, with so many bad reviews going down should not have as a surprise.

[stompix]

I'm surprised it took so long, I don't think anyone would be surprised they went down, after all, it's not like they were affected by the ripple waves of the Defi schemes going down, they were actually one of Celsius's partners,  the moment this notice went up:
https://nuri.com/blog/bitcoin-interest-account-withdrawals-paused/
it was clear they will go down.

Nuri was funded by some EU grant so I'm pretty sure there were no investors that had an active role in the service's operations.

They only got some 100k from EASME, 18 million came from Early Bird, and some other millions from NKB and others, got 50 mils, lost 500, Erik Voorhees must be proud of all his shilling.

[tadamichi]

Very true, rebranding costs money and despite knowing the financial status of their business they still went ahead to do a rebranding, probably they were hoping for a huge influx of customers to miraculously change the situation.

They were actually trying to lure in new users trough sign up bonuses, bonuses for regular investments and bonuses for referrals, so high that it would have likely taken years to get a ROI on this for the company. Really bad accounting on their part, but they were run at a loss since years beforehand, so it was probably one last attempt to artificially boost their user metrics so they could be attractive to investors, while their whole business model was broken and relied on giving users freebies. We're in peak fiat.

[1miau]

...

Very true, rebranding costs money and despite knowing the financial status of their business they still went ahead to do a rebranding, probably they were hoping for a huge influx of customers to miraculously change the situation.

I don't know if there's a huge costs for a digital service like Bitwala / Nuri to do a rebranding. Changing the name as a digital company shouldn't be a big obstacle and (as from my knowledge) it can be done quickly and with very low costs. It's not like a supermarket where you have to change physical things, Bitwala / Nuri is digital.

I guess this is the same way most of them will end up if they refuse to be transparent with how they treat their customers, with so many bad reviews going down should not have as a surprise.

Exactly, rebranding is mainly to get rid of bad internet reviews, scam accusations and bad news on crypto news sites. By changing their name, such reviews can't be found because some people don't know their old name.
Most likely, experienced crypto bros can't be tricked by this but many Newbies will still fall for it. And Newbies are a big target group.

[NotATether]

By changing their name, such reviews can't be found because some people don't know their old name.
Most likely, experienced crypto bros can't be tricked by this but many Newbies will still fall for it. And Newbies are a big target group.

I would disagree with this just for Nuri's case because the title of their website - the html <title> tag - had "NURI (formerly Bitwala)" so it was relatively easy for all people to find out their old name. If you ask me I don't know what the heck their rebranding was supposed to accomplish besides trying to attract more investors.

[stompix]

If you ask me I don't know what the heck their rebranding was supposed to accomplish besides trying to attract more investors.

Dumping the old names does create a feeling of let's go and trust these guys one more time, it does tempt the ones that just had a go for Bitwala to try this one again, maybe something has changed, and so on. If you see the old name and the old interface no way you're going to try it again.
Also, at least in their minds, maybe they were trying to find a new audience, while bitwala doesn't really mean anything according to all these online dictionaries Nuri does have a meaning in Arabic and in Korean (light/world) so who knows their plans might have been expanding in one of those regions if they fail at home.

I don't know if there a huge costs for a digital service like Bitwala / Nuri to do a rebranding. Changing the name as a digital company shouldn't be a big obstacle and (as from my knowledge) it can be done quickly and with very low costs. It's not like a supermarket where you have to change physical things, Bitwala / Nuri is digital.

Probably a small percentage of one round of investment if it were just for the name but from what people were saying overall social media they did change the app also, although the reviews weren't that positive so that might have cost a bit more, but yeah no way closer to change all those physical signs and all the branding in a retail store, Auchan spent on average 1 million euros for each superstore in bought in the last decade just on rebranding. These guys probably spend 500$ on some banners and more than that on their office coffee mugs and pencils.

[1miau]

By changing their name, such reviews can't be found because some people don't know their old name.
Most likely, experienced crypto bros can't be tricked by this but many Newbies will still fall for it. And Newbies are a big target group.

I would disagree with this just for Nuri's case because the title of their website - the html <title> tag - had "NURI (formerly Bitwala)" so it was relatively easy for all people to find out their old name.

Nice to know, I've not visited their website recently.
Obviously their goal has been different from what we could expect and sometimes business decisions are very tricky.

Unfortunately, there are quite a few questionable crypto players from Germany.
Maybe you've heard from Savedriod. They are changing the purpose of their project constantly because of "innovation" (which means: so far, our idea has proven to be bad).