Justcoin

» see justcoin.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Justcoin was a Norwegian bitcoin exchange, founded in Oslo in May 2013 by Andreas Brekken and Klaus Bugge Lund. It traded bitcoin and other digital assets against fiat, and what made it matter locally was the krone pair. If you were in Norway in 2013 and wanted bitcoin with money from a Norwegian bank account, this was the obvious way to do it, and for a time close to the only one.

That is the whole business model of a regional exchange and also its entire vulnerability. An exchange is not really a technology company. It is a company with a bank account, and everything it sells depends on being able to move kroner in and out of that account on behalf of strangers.

In late October 2014 the bank closed the account.

~ the case file ~

~ the bank ~

Trading stopped on 29 October 2014. Customers were given until 11 November to withdraw their funds, which they could do, so this was an orderly exit rather than a loss of deposits. That distinction is worth stating plainly in a category where the usual ending involves money that cannot be found.

The reason was that no other Norwegian bank would take the business. One institution dropping a crypto client is a commercial decision; an entire national banking sector declining to replace it is something closer to policy, arrived at without anybody having to write it down. Norway's banks had decided that bitcoin exchanges were not worth the compliance exposure. A company with no account has no product, and there was nothing wrong with Justcoin's own software when it stopped.

~ the brand after the product ~

In November 2014 ANX, a Hong Kong digital asset company, bought the Justcoin domain and the rights to the name and said it would relaunch on the 24th, expanding its European presence. So the name came back without the founders and without the Norwegian bank access that had been the entire point of it.

The archive shows how that ended. Through 2015 and into 2016 justcoin.com served a real application. By the summer of 2016 it was down to a two kilobyte page that said "Loading...", and some time between 3 and 10 August the host began serving a notice instead: "As of today, JUSTCOIN users will be migrated to our ANXPRO trading platform." That page was built on Instapage, a marketing landing page tool, which is a strange and slightly undignified gravestone for an exchange. It carried a 2016 copyright line and was still being served, word for word, in January 2018, untouched for the seventeen months in between. The press has generally recorded Justcoin as closing in early 2017 over Norwegian regulatory uncertainty; the domain itself says the name was retired in August 2016.

Turkey's own reckoning with crypto exchanges came later and went much worse, and the Thodex collapse in 2021 took real deposits with it. Justcoin is the version where the banking system closes the door early and everybody gets their money back, which is the outcome nobody writes about.

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