According to a customer email received from CoinDesk on December 30th, Xapo, one of the earliest Bitcoin custodians, will end its service to US customers on March 1st.
“Due to a change in our global business strategy, Xapo, Inc. is leaving the US market and will close all US customer Xapo accounts. Therefore, you have to transfer your money to an external Bitcoin address, ”the company writes in the email.
According to a blog post from May, Xapo is just about to switch to a digital banking service. Founder Wences Casares confirmed the move to CoinDesk in an email and wrote: “Our key value proposition is to protect our customers’ savings, especially in emerging markets. Our target customers are people with savings greater than $ 30,000 but less than $ 1 million who do not want to keep all of their savings in their local currency or in their country. Because of their sums, they do not have access to international private banking services. “
After obtaining a banking license in Gibraltar, the company realized it needed to set up a separate organization to comply with US banking regulations in a market with no high demand for their specific services. “Serving the US market would take a lot of effort, time and investment, a separate organization within Xapo to support it, and it would still deliver a worse product than what we can offer internationally,” added Casares added.
In the email to customers, they were asked to transfer their BTC holdings to an external address. Buying and receiving Bitcoin in the app has also been disabled.
Xapo was also one of the earliest participants in the Facebook-led scales initiative that became the stablecoin project diem.
