Major Bitcoin Marketplace Closing Down

If you use the once-popular website Pulse.io to hold or trade your Bitcoin, and you haven’t logged in for a while, you may wish to do so in the very near future. The site was once seen as one of the leading places for matching Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash with buyers and sellers, but for a variety of reasons (not all of which are clear) it’s about to disappear forever - and if you don’t act quickly, it might have the right to take all of your Bitcoin with you when it goes.

The news that Pulse was about to close down first appeared online last week and has since been confirmed by the site's operators, although they refuse to be drawn on the reasons why. A variety of reasons have been proposed such as the potential for legal action from the government of the United States of America, but if they've received a writ, they're not in the mood to tell anybody. All we can say for certain is that they'll close for the last time on June 26th, and after that date, it will be impossible to gain access to any resources held on the website - including any stray currency or Bitcoin you may have left behind.

By the time the site shuts down, it will have been dormant for two months. Registrations to new members have been closed down with immediate effect, and new deals will be blocked after April 23rd, rendering the site useless to all intents and purposes. Balances held in accounts will remain accessible between then and the end-of-June deadline, but Purse.io hasn't been forthcoming about what will happen to any residual balances left over after that date. Given the fact that Pulse is believed to have been hit hard by Amazon's decision to cut payments to affiliates, they might need your money to pay a few of their essential bills. That's probably not good news to any creditors the company currently has.

It’s been known for a while - ever since Facebook Libra brought the existence and nature of crypto to the attention of the United States Government, in fact - that the US authorities are not big fans of crypto. They believe that it poses an existential threat to the dollar (and, in fact, to all global currencies), and also the established system of banking. Their opposition to the creation and implementation of crypto has forced Facebook to think again about its plans for Libra, but authorities that once turned a blind eye to Bitcoin trading have suddenly taken an interest. As one of the larger players in the market, Pulse.io might have been a large-enough target for an opening strike.

Without further information from the operators, it's impossible to say whether we should blame Amazon, the government, or something else for Pulse's demise, but the site hadn't become any quieter than usual in the past few months. Something must have prompted them to close the doors suddenly, but we may never know what that 'something' was. Instead, we're left with a market that's just lost one of its major trading outposts with almost no warning, and it could scarcely have come at a worse time.

This ought to have been a huge year for Bitcoin, given that the four-yearly halving event is planned for May. Instead, it's turned into the year that we all found out that cryptocurrency is just as vulnerable to changes in the global markets as any other form of currency, and it's not as resilient as we once thought or hoped. The price of Bitcoin dropped perilously close to $1,000 at the end of March, and although it's now recovering, it's shattered the illusion of being panic-resistant forever. Many experts had hoped that Bitcoin would head into the halving event with a value of somewhere between ten and twenty thousand dollars. Instead, it's on track to commence with a value closer to $5,000.

All of this confusion has left traders with one less place to do their trading, and less information about whether or not trading is a good idea at all right now. In the past two months, the value of the coin has been less predictable than an online slots game. In actuality, you can use cryptocurrency to place bets on the games at many UK casino slots now, and in some cases, you might see a better return than you'd get from trying to make a profit through trading. We wouldn't recommend that, though. As pleasing as wins at an online slots casino are, they're still driven by randomly-generated processes. You can exercise more control than that over the value of your Bitcoin portfolio, and so it might be the case that the best thing to do right now is nothing at all.

These are uncharted waters for the whole world, and the simple truth is that Bitcoin - like all forms of crypto - has never been through anything like this before. Combine the unpredictability of the markets with the fact that halving is about to begin in a month, and only a fool would try to make a confident prediction about what the price of Bitcoin might look like by June or July. It could be twenty thousand dollars. It could be two thousand. We won’t know until we get there, and as frustrating as that is to people who are used to making small gains from smart trading decisions, that might mean that a cautious approach might be the best one for the moment.

Even if you wanted to carry out trading activity at the moment, thanks to the sudden loss of Pulse, you have one fewer option in terms of where to do it. Smaller websites and forums that offer the same range of services exist, but none that had Pulse's reputation or prominence. A new top dog will emerge from the pack, but it might be a while before it becomes clear who that top dog will be. In the meantime, we say a fond farewell to Purse. We wish we knew why we had to wave goodbye to you, but we're waving goodbye all the same.