Thank you for bringing this up, we of course are aware of the accusations. I will share our press release regarding this with all of you since we want the community to hear all parts of the story.
Cointed has been a successful all-round crypto service provider since 2014. Starting as a small and local start-up in Austria as a crypto exchange and Bitcoin ATM provider, we have now developed a number of products and services in the areas of GPU mining, crypto hardware development and payment processing for crypto transactions. We have established trust with customers and partners all over the world through great customer service, as well as being transparent and straightforward with everyone we work with from the very start.
The Cointed parent company in Hong Kong “Cointed Ltd.” is about to start its own ICO. This is a very exciting time for us, since we experience more positive feedback in recent times not only towards us, but the crypto landscape as a whole.
As Cointed continues its rapid global expansion, we begin to feel the limitations of existing products and services in the crypto world. We are convinced that the crypto world deserves the best products possible. For the crypto scene to sustainably grow in the long term, the access to cryptocurrencies needs to be as easy, fast and convenient as possible.
One of those areas are Crypto ATMs, which allow everyone to exchange cash for cryptocurrencies and vice versa. Cointed is now the biggest Crypto ATM provider in Europe and has gained plenty of experience and feedback from customers and partners as to what problems existing ATMs have -both from the hardware and software side - and how they can be improved. We want to allow everyone involved in the crypto scene to enjoy a better-quality product.
Unfortunately, one of our now former suppliers, General Bytes, has decided to publicly denounce us for trying to expand our product line and develop our own ATM. We decided to end a long and fruitful business relationship in a friendly manner and face new challenges by envisioning how to enhance existing products. The response from our former partner was to make baseless and easily disprovable accusations.
We are deeply dissatisfied with how the situation unfolded. Our former partner was not ready to let his product compete on the open market and therefore threatened us for months not to develop or produce any products he would consider a risk to his own business – which defies the core principles of an open market. The former partner has burned bridges with a company that used to be one of his best customers, simply because he was afraid to make a little less profit.
Even though there is no contractual obligation to do any of this, the Austrian “Cointed GmbH”, which is the licensing partner of our former partner respected those wishes and didn’t even deploy the Cointed-owned Crypto ATMs in countries the former partner didn’t want to be associated with - against our own business interests.
We were convinced that a clean termination of our business relationship would be possible. We deeply regret that our former partner decided to take these steps and are convinced that they only serve to hurt his own reputation.
We at Cointed will continue to follow our determined path to offer the best products and services possible. We are excited for the times to come and invite you all to join us in shaping the independent and progressive financial world of the future.