This is the end of Savedroid
The start-up "Advanced Bitcoin Technologies AG" is discontinuing its savings app. The company originally launched the app, but lost a lot of sympathy with a joke.
The shock came in April 2018, when Yassin Hankir had just raised 40 million euros with his start-up Savedroid via an ICO, the cryptocurrency equivalent of an IPO. The start-up's app allowed customers to save very small amounts and the new millions were to be used to create a platform for trading cryptocurrencies.
These were big plans and investors had at least as high hopes for him and the Frankfurt-based fintech when, in April 2018, suddenly nothing worked at all. The website? Offline. Over the phone? Nobody reachable. The office? Deserted. Hankir? Posted a photo of an airport. And the money? It seemed to be gone.
It wasn't until hours later that the Savedroid founder and the money reappeared. It was all just a joke, a large-scale PR stunt to draw attention to the dangers of crypto IPOs. However, the joke clearly backfired and caused a veritable shitstorm for Hankir, from which the Frankfurt-based fintech only managed to recover somewhat.
In 2019, Hankir actually took its start-up public again with the help of a reverse takeover, officially to create confidence. Now there is more news from the parent company, which is called "Advanced Bitcoin Technologies AG", or ABT for short. The fintech is discontinuing its original app Savedroid completely. The company made the announcement, citing the restructuring of the business as the reason for the decision. "The discontinuation of the savings app is not a farewell for us, but the start of the product transformation towards a multi-currency wallet that combines the worlds of the euro and Bitcoin," says Hankir, CEO of Advanced Bitcoin Technologies and founder of Savedroid.
In the future, the company wants to focus entirely on the major topic of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Customers will soon be able to receive, store or exchange fiat currencies as well as cryptocurrencies or digital currencies on the company's platform. The company will then earn its money from transaction fees and differences in the exchange rate between the currencies, which it intends to exploit.
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