Coinprism, was founded in 2014 as an online wallet service for “colored coins” that allowed users to store and color their Bitcoins. It recently announced in a message on its website that it would shut down, and advised users to “withdraw your funds and export your private keys before this date.”
Some industry analysts observed that Coinprism’s business model was ahead of its time. By using the bitcoin blockchain to create tokens representing other assets, its colored coins presaged the rise of ethereum and other networks built explicitly for such use cases. Coinprism’s shutdown echoes the wild swings in the market for bitcoins.
Tounder and chief executive Flavien Charlon pointed out in an email to CoinDesk that much has changed since 2014, both on the tech and regulatory fronts.
“While we have been one of the first in the area of blockchain tokens, long before ethereum was even released, the ecosystem has since shifted towards ERC-20, which is more flexible and more powerful than bitcoin-based systems,The unpredictability of transactions fees and confirmation times in the past couple of years have also made it hard to argue bitcoin is a good platform for this.”