Blocktrail.com was the home of the Blocktrail Bitcoin wallet. The website promised Bitcoin investors “unparalleled security through Multi-Signature technology.” It informed them that they would be in complete control of their coins at all times. In this article, we explore what happened to Blocktrail.com. We follow the site’s history, identify the team behind the service, and describe the launch of the Blocktrail wallet and its acquisition by Bitmain. 

People often contact us with information about a long string of numbers and letters -- sometimes they wrote themselves a note years ago, and they're hoping that we can help them identify what the characters mean.This article should help you identify some of these strings.

StrongCoin.com was a cryptocurrency service that called itself “The only Bitcoin e-wallet service that’s not vulnerable to security breaches.” The site promised, “No more lost or stolen wallet.dat [files].” (A wallet.dat file is the wallet backup for Bitcoin Core / Bitcoin-Qt wallets). An attempt to visit StrongCoin.com today will lead you to the message, “This site can’t be reached” because “StrongCoin.com’s server IP address could not be found.” 

Many of our clients prefer to encrypt their email communications with us, including their wallet backup and password guesses. If you're already familiar with using PGP (and the OpenPGP protocol), you probably don't need to read this article. You can find our public encryption key here.If you haven't used PGP before, this article lays out our recommended approach, and points you to tutorials to get you up and running.

We estimate that about 2.45% of lost Bitcoin is recoverable. Using Chainalysis’ estimate, this gives us a range of between 68,110 and 92,855 Bitcoin that are recoverable. At current prices (a Bitcoin is worth approximately $41,500 as of April 20, 2022) this suggests that between USD $3 - 3.9 billion in Bitcoin is recoverable.

Many of the cryptocurrency wallets created since 2013 have used a very simple backup mechanism called a recovery seed (also known as a mnemonic, a seed phrase, or a recovery phrase). These phrases are almost always either 12 or 24 words long (although they can be as long as 25 words). These phrases are a curious combination of username and password -- and if you were to find one, and then share it with the wrong person, that person could remove all the funds from your wallet leaving you with essentially no recourse to recover the funds.

The Ethereum presale was literally a sale of Ether to investors before Ether existed. Investors could buy Ether with Bitcoin, even though the Ethereum blockchain did not yet exist, and the genesis block had not yet been mined.When it launched on July 22, 2014, the Ethereum presale was so successful that Camila Russo described it in a CoinDesk.com article as the “Sale of the Century."

In an interview with Kevin Rose, host of the Proof podcast, The LarvaLabs founders guesstimated that between 20-30% of punks were held in wallets whose owners no longer controlled their private keys. (Once private keys are lost, the owner can no longer prove that they own the 'Punk, let alone move them to a different wallet).

If you try to find GDAX.com today, you will discover that the site is no longer online. So, what happened to a platform so popular that at one time it tweeted, “A new all-time high in daily volume! Over $650 million of $BTC, $ETH, and $LTC have been traded in the past 24 hours.” We took some time to find out what happened to GDAX.com by following its history, its services, and some of its milestones.

Scams involving Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies are rapidly increasing in frequency. If you have been scammed, you may feel angry, embarrassed and unsure of where to turn to recover your funds. This article lays out the best practices for attempting to recover your funds.

One of the earliest wallet platforms, Blockchain.com (originally Blockchain.info) was founded in 2011 and released its first Bitcoin wallet in January 2012. Since its release, the Blockchain wallet has received quite a number of accolades as well as commonly being listed in many 5-10 and top 10 cryptocurrency wallet lists.

Whether it be centralized exchanges such as Binance, Kraken, and Coinbase, or decentralized protocols like Uniswap or Pancake swap, there is no shortage of options for buying, selling, and storing coins and tokens.However, this wasn’t always the case, and for a time, the number of options was severely limited.