We are shutting down Cake Pay Web (not Mobile) for a while

We have some somber news today. We are temporarily shutting down Cake Pay Web for the time being.

We expect to resume operations later this year, offering you an even better experience. All users with orders in-flight will be delivered or reimbursed.

This is a difficult decision for us, but we believe it is the right decision. Cake Pay Web was used and loved by many as an excellent way to purchase gift cards with cryptocurrencies, but persistent issues with the provider for this service led to at-times weak reliability.

Reliability is important for us

Recently, the reliability situation worsened, with Cake Pay Web experiencing over 50% downtime in the past week due to provider maintenance. This is different than January through April, where reliability was much higher (but still not quite where we wanted it to be).

Cake Labs prides itself on being easy to use and reliable. Cake Wallet is a great example of this, where we have delivered a user-friendly wallet for over five years. It is difficult to reconcile our desire to be reliable with the real-life performance of Cake Pay Web.

For repeat customers especially, it is extremely important to us that users consistently have good experiences. When Cake Pay Web had vendor issues, we could not promise a good experience, and it reflected badly on our reputation.

Ultimately, we have decided that continuing to operate a web store with an unreliable service provider will lead to more long-term damage to our reputation than benefits. Users will get upset when things go wrong, and it takes a lot of resources and patience from our excellent support staff to address these issues. Thus, we are ending operations for now until we can re-launch with an improved experience.

Sending money on the old rails is annoying

Sending cryptocurrency is very fast and simple. You type in an address and amount, click send, and that’s it.

Sending fiat is far more annoying, especially when our partner did not take advantage of some of the fastest options.

For Cake Pay Web in our first iteration, we needed to pre-fund a deposit, which was used as people bought things from the store. That’s fine, but it’s not fine when transferring money takes several business days.

This is one of the unexpected things that changed over the last few months. Our partner would initially credit funds almost immediately after we sent them, but this was changed to be several business days. The side effect is that Cake Pay had to front a lot more money than before, leading to increased risks for us and increased costs.

Post-FTX, we didn’t feel comfortable with considerable sums of money sitting with a partner that we didn’t trust very much. If we trusted them, then it could be fine (but still not ideal).

This isn’t the end of Cake Pay Web

Cake Pay Web is shut down for now, but we aren’t gone forever! Our goal is to be back up before the end of the year, hopefully sooner.

It will take some time to line up new partners and make sure the user experience exceeds our expectations.

In the meantime, USA users can use Cake Pay Mobile, available in Cake Wallet and Monero.com by Cake Wallet.

What worked well

We want to end on a happy note, since there were a lot of good things about Cake Pay Web!

First, the user response to the website was very strong and positive. User demand for the service is very high, and the amount of purchases through the platform exceeded our expectations. We are very grateful to have such a supportive community.

Second, the silent majority were very understanding and patient. When we did run into downtime, the vast majority of people were undeterred, and would simply check back later. While we don’t want to run a service with downtime, it does speak to the resiliency of our users.

Third, the products that we could offer were genuinely interesting. We are taking what we learned and applying that to Cake Pay Mobile and our next version of Cake Pay Web.