The McxNOW digital currency exchange is reportedly “shutting down for a period of time” due to an overwhelming amount of support requests they are incapable of addressing in a timely manner.
The website’s founder notes that McxNOW is a one-man operation (he does by the name “RealSolid” and is reportedly from Australia — little else is known), and he’s be receiving a whopping 200-400 new support inquiries per day. “This makes development of mcxNOW nearly impossible without neglecting valid user requests through support,” he writes in a statement on the website’s homepage.
Users have a little under a month to withdraw their digital currency from the service before the website undergoes an overhaul on December 20th.
McxNOW differs from other exchanges in that the service pays interest to users. So far, about 200 BTC has been paid according to RealSolid. Interest is collected as a 25 percent cut of the service’s transaction fees.
Here’s the full statement from RealSolid:
mcxNOW has seen unprecedented growth in recent months and especially in the last few weeks. mcxNOW is a custom coded exchange built 100% by one man in C++ . This means if anything has to be modified then only one person can do it.
Unfortunately the growth has been too fast to match with the support requirement as only one person can currently do all support. This is a burden of 200 to 400 emails a day among many requests on IRC and through chat. This makes development of mcxNOW nearly impossible without neglecting valid user requests through support.
I am happy that in over 7 months mcxNOW has not been hacked or lost any coins and that the exchange has scaled well from 100 users upto a peak of about 3500 users online at once, it shows the design here is pretty good. However I never anticipated some aspects of running an exchange that are quite important (ie. support) so I need to work on this before allowing the site to grow.
I advise everyone to withdraw their coins and use other exchanges until mcxNOW returns. I will need at least one month, and perhaps as many as 3 before I can make the site live again. If you fail to withdraw coins before December 20th then you’ll have to wait until the site is live again before withdrawing, whatever balance you hold will carry over. After December 20th passes a test version of mcxNOW will be put up that you can help test without using real coins, this will include the new gaming platform.
All existing mcxFEE holders will have the same mcxFEE balance when the site relaunches. I’m allowing people to trade mcxFEE up until December 20th in case they want to exit them.
I apologize for needing to do this, the stress and burden of running a successful exchange in the current way is just untenable for me now. I can barely sleep, I am getting health issues, etc. There truly is no alternative than some downtime. I apologize mainly to mcxFEE holders as they have invested in the exchange and will miss revenue in the downtime.
mcxNOW will be back and even better than before, I truly believe we have the best trading platform and cryptocommunity platform here but I need to work on these other facets before it becomes a real problem. I will use all the knowledge I have gathered over the last 7 months to make something bulletproof and easy to maintain.
Thank you for your support and hopefully we can see all of you back here relatively soon.