Once valued at $1.5 billion, crypto payment provider Wyre will shut down by the end of January

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(Kitco News) – Wyre, the winter-running crypto payments provider, is expected to end its services by the end of January.

According to a report from Axios, Ioannis Giannaros, the CEO of Wyre, recently sent an email to employees of the company informing them that he was going to liquidate the company and plans to end the services this month.

“We will continue to do everything we can, but I want everyone to be prepared for the fact that we will have to unwind the business over the next couple of weeks,” the email reads. “We are still operating but will scale back to plan our next steps,” Ginnaros said in a follow-up email.

It seems that some employees knew that this development was imminent. On Dec. 31, Michael Staib, a technical engineer who previously worked for Wyre, said in a LinkedIn post that has since been deleted that “Wyre will not continue as a profitable business.”

On Thursday, popular crypto wallet MetaMask appeared to confirm Wyre’s demise when it announced that it had removed Wyre from its mobile aggregator, which allows users to buy crypto directly through their digital wallets.

“We are currently working on removing the extensions and appreciate your patience,” MetaMask said, asking users not to use Wyre on the mobile aggregator.

Wyre was originally founded in 2013 by Ioannis Giannaros and Michael Dunworth and raised a total of $29.1 million over nine funding rounds, according to data from Crunchbase. Some of its investors include Kraken, Pantera Capital, Stellar Development Foundation and Samsung NEXT and Draper Associates.

Last April, one-click payment provider Bolt was in talks to acquire Wyre for a price of $1.5 billion, but that deal was ultimately terminated in September after Wyre and Bolt decided to remain independent companies. .

According to Dunworth, the volatility in the crypto market and general tech market conditions were the main reasons for the failure of the deal.

It was expected that the two companies would enter into a business agreement where Bolt would implement Wyre’s one-click solution for the Bolt Client Platform, but that seems unlikely following these developments at Wyre.

Wyre is far from the only company that has been significantly impacted by the 2022 bear market. In addition to the Terra/Luna and FTX meltdowns, which sent contagious shockwaves throughout the ecosystem, several other companies filed the balance sheet, including Three Arrows Capital, Voyager Digital, Celsius, BlockFi and Core Scientific.

A host of other companies also announced major staff reductions, including Kraken, Huobi, Galaxy Digital, Coinbase, Digital Currency Group, Genesis Global Capital, Dapper Labs, Bybit, Crypto.com and Silvergate Bank.

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