Brawker, a bitcoin marketplace which connects users who wish to purchase items online to bitcoin buyers has been shut down due to a lack of users and competition.

Initially, the idea of connecting bitcoin buyers to e-commerce users such as Amazon was favored by the public, as purchasing bitcoins using credit cards was not as easy as today. Brawker allowed its users to create requests for anything online, such as gift cards, refill cards and etc. If the request is accepted, the bitcoin buyer would purchase the item, deliver it to the user while the user sends the bitcoins in return with a discount. The service was popular among bitcoin enthusiasts for quite some time.

However, a relatively large number of bitcoin services such as coins.ph and coins.co.th have emerged over the past year, and bitcoin services like Brawker began lose its significance.

Not only do services such as Coins.ph allow its users purchase bitcoins through local banks, thousands of ATMs and through local remittances services, coins.ph partnered with nationwide e-commerce platforms in the Philippines such as Metrodeal to allow its users to purchase items online just like Brawker did two years ago.

As more services like Coins.ph started to attract bitcoin users in Asia especially, bitcoin marketplaces such as Brawker could not withstand the competition.

The brawker team stated in their blog:

“The Bitcoin community came up with many great startups and the environment is very different from what it was 18 months ago, when we started working on this project.”

Instead of holding onto a service, which would be difficult to sustain, the Brawker team is currently trying to work on their next projects that they say is “even more useful to the community.”

During the following months after the initial launch however, Brawker had received positive reviews and kept a consistent number of users throughout their first year. Although the deals were minimal, Brawker implemented some innovative features and allowed users to live solely bitcoin in a sense.

Open Sourcing the Platform

Although the service will not continue, the Brawker team plans to open source parts of the coding.  The company believes that the project, especially the multi-signature framework that was used by Brawker could be useful to other developers.

The Brawker stated in their official blog:

“After that, we are aiming to open-source some parts of our code - particularly the multisignature framework - in the hope that some of it might still be useful to others. Do contact us if you are thinking about using it, we will be glad to help.”

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