Another One Bites the Dust: BitMarket Shutters Its Doors

The Polish exchange BitMarket, who once was touted as a possible competitor for OpenBazaar, announced Sunday that due to a “loss of liquidity” they had ceased operations.

Investors attempting to access the website now are met with a plain white page that on first glance looks like a standard error message. I actually refreshed the page before realizing that it’s actually a message in both Polish and English that states:

“Dear Users, We regret to inform you that due to the loss of liquidity, since 08/07/2019, Bitmarket.pl/net was forced to cease its operations. We will inform you about further steps.”

BitMarket was founded in 2014 and is owned and operated by Capital Group. When it was operating, BitMarket supported both fiat to cryptocurrency trading pairs as well as cryptocurrency trading pairs. The exchange gained most of its liquidity from Poland, Austria, Finland, Estonia, and Germany.

At one point, BitMarket was fairly popular because it offered traders some advanced order types. For instance, traders were able to place Stop Loss and Take Profit orders for automatic trading that operates 24/7 and they could participate in Margin Trading by trading with a leverage of up to 1:10.

Though the exchange didn’t offer a wide variety of cryptocurrency assets for trade, the ones they did offer were some of the industry leaders, such as Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, and Litecoin. Additionally, investors were able to utilize fiat currencies for exchange with either the Polish zloty (PLN) or the Euro (EUR) .

While BitMarket never experienced any major hacks, loss of funds, or complaints of security issues, some investors have pointed out that there were strange happenings around BitMarket over the past week or so.

Users reported being forced to change their passwords and their API keys without explanation and that when attempting to withdraw funds they were asked to comply with addition KYC measures such as a photo of their face holding their government-issued ID and “a note confirming that you are using BitMarket to buy Bitcoin for yourself, as an investment.”

Apparently BitMarket representatives attempted to address concerns by stating that they were only targeting people with expired IDs in order to comply with long overdue KYC requirements, but this didn’t do much to alleviate concerns.