Bitcoin Exchange TradeHill Suspends Trading

 

The Bitcoin economy may be in some real trouble. After the announcement last week that e-payments service Paxum would no longer support Bitcoin clients, at least one major Bitcoin exchange has shut down. Chile-based TradeHill had been using Paxum, a PayPal competitor, for a large percentage of money transfers. The loss of Paxum, coupled with recent problems banking with Citibank that caused TradeHill to fall behind on processing transactions and other troubles, left the founders feeling like they had no choice but to suspend trading and return client deposits.

The founders just posted a letter on the TradeHill blog.

 

Dear Clients,

Effective immediately TradeHill will be shutting down trading / deposits and returning all client funds.
Due to increasing regulation TradeHill can not operate in it’s current capacity without proper money transmission licensing. Combined with multiple bank account closures and Paxum’s decision to close all Bitcoin business accounts, we have deemed the best course of action is to halt trading and pursue licensing while raising funds.
SEPA transfers for our Euro customers have been enabled.

Everyone at TradeHill has also been working without pay for several months after one of our payment processors removed over $100,000 dollars from our account without notice. We decided to cover this loss for now instead of passing it on to our customers and are taking legal action against the processor. We would also like to make it known that our relationship with Paxum has been great and hope to work with them in the future.

We will be focusing on Bitcoin.com and are preparing to release a new site before the end of the month.
It has been a pleasure working with the Bitcoin community and look forward to continuing our business in the future. More details to come soon.

Sincerely,

Jered Kenna
Chief Executive Officer
TradeHill 

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