Sparkswap, a decentralized exchange, announced on Tuesday its decision to shut services, citing an inadequate number of users on its platform.
“Unfortunately, we weren’t able to build a large enough audience to sustain the business over the long term,” Trey Griffith, founder of the platform, noted. “Building a cryptocurrency business, especially one that interacts with the fiat banking system, is an expensive endeavor, and as it stands right now the style of self-custody we were espousing is too niche to make our business sustainable.”
The platform already stopped taking new users along with no additional USD deposits. All trading services will be terminated on March 24, along with the shut down of the Lightning nodes by the end of this month.
The official announcement also assured that even after the termination of its services, the fiat deposits of the traders would be kept safely with the platform’s baking partner AnchorUSD.
“AnchorUSD has mobile applications for iOS and Android, and offers a High Yield USD Interest account as well as mobile crypto trading” the Medium post added. “You can also redeem your USD to your bank account. All fees for bank account redemptions via AnchorUSD will be waived until the end of April.”
Too many failing crypto ventures
Founded in 2017, the California-based company was built on the Lightning Network and also got the attention of venture capitals, raising $3.5 million from Pantera Capital, Initialized Capital, and a few others.
Last week, Paradigm Labs, a Polychain-backed decentralized finance (DeFi) startup, shut down due to its inability to come up with a market-resilient product.
“For now, our focus as a company will move to FinTech more broadly, but we’ll be watching Bitcoin and Lightning development closely and plan to continue to be productive members of those communities,” Sparkswap added.
