Brawker
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Brawker was a Hong Kong-based Bitcoin startup launched in late 2013 by CEO Cyril Houri (previously founder of Infosplit and Navizon). It ran a peer-to-peer marketplace that let users buy almost anything online with bitcoin: a bitcoin holder listed an item and placed the coins in escrow, and a buyer purchased the item with a credit card, debit card or PayPal account in exchange for the bitcoins - often at a small discount that incentivized bitcoin spending. After the Mt. Gox collapse, Brawker moved to multisignature transactions so that neither the e-commerce transaction nor the bitcoin transfer happened on its infrastructure and it never held customer funds. The service charged 1% per party.
02 / Brawker FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Brawker shut down because it could not scale against stronger competition: many other startups offered the same or better services, leaving Brawker no room to grow. The founders also pointed to a decline in bitcoin spending, which shrank the transaction base the peer-to-peer marketplace depended on.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
Brawker ended operations.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Brawker launched in late 2013 as a Hong Kong-based peer-to-peer bitcoin marketplace, going live in April 2014.
- 02
After the Mt. Gox bankruptcy, the company rebuilt around multisignature transactions, making both the e-commerce and bitcoin legs of a trade happen outside its own infrastructure.
- 03
Faced with high competition from startups offering the same or better services and declining bitcoin spending, Brawker shut down. No exact shutdown date has been documented.
- 04
No reliable realized loss figure with clear subject, period and basis has been disclosed.