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Comment by ovi256 | Hacker News Reader

The shutdown announcement says the shutdown was caused by "challenges during the ongoing very cold crypto-winter". Wish we had more details about that. Did the ongoing winter reduce income to make the service unprofitable ?

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Their volumes have been getting smaller and smaller throughout the years. Likely reason is that the service just isn't profitable any more. Their volumes are public: https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins

These days there are lots of services offering p2p trading, and big exchanges like Binance also have p2p trading services for multiple cryptocurrencies. I would guess that Binance p2p volume alone is likely many times of that from LocalBitcoins these days. Most players don't publish their volumes though.

Thanks you for sharing the volumes link. Fascinating to say the least.

Reading between the lines: "We've made some risky investments as a side deal that REALLY didn't pan out."

Yield farming client funds?

Nah they had very little of that actually available. They were not operating like a big crypto exchange.

What makes you say that? They are shutting down in a responsible and orderly fashion, so I'm willing to take it at face value that they just aren't profitable anymore.

That's likely also the case, but I would at the very least expect a crypto exchange company to keep all their reserves in crypto, which has now completely plummeted in value. Localbitcoins are a bit different than the typical exchange so their exposure is likely less, but if you look at Binance or Robinhood they're all gambling with their backing money like a drunk at the horse races.

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