Givbit — Send Bitcoin To Your Friends — R.I.P.

9 months ago Alex Morris, Rana and I started work on a new cryptocurrency app called Givbit - think Venmo powered by Bitcoin. Send cryptocurrency to your friends with a push of a button. Within 3 months it would be dead, joining my git repo graveyard, dead before even acquiring one user. During our market research we learned something that would change the way we think about cryptocurrency applications. We discovered our project was doomed and hundreds of others could be as well.

You have to spend cryptocurrency in blockchain apps for them to succeed. If no one is willing to spend their holdings, how are these apps going to have any users? Until this mentality changes, I believe it will be challenging to make that killer blockchain app. We need to move from hodlers to spenders and users. Until that happens, many more projects will fail. I hope I’m wrong, but I fear I’m right.

The idea for Givbit came to me while I was sending money to a babysitter using Venmo. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could do this with Bitcoin? I mean, of course my babysitter wouldn’t want to get paid in Bitcoin but surely someone would. We’d monetize it by charging vendors 1% for each transaction. We…