What is Blockchain.com? – The Kryptonome

The Blockchain.com website may look like an “official” website, but it’s actually a company’s website.

The Blockchain.com domain was registered in 2011, which is two and a half years after Bitcoin was created. The official domain registered by Satoshi Nakamoto was actually bitcoin.org, registered three months before Satoshi announced his celebrated whitepaper on October 31, 2008.

When the Blockchain.com website went online, it was simply an explorer, i.e. a website where it was possible to see the transactions recorded on Bitcoin’s blockchain, as well as other information such as circulating supply, price chart, and so on.

It is worth noting that in 2011 very few cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin existed, such as Litecoin and Namecoin, while well-known cryptocurrencies such as Dogecoin and Ripple were born just two years later. Ethereum actually came into being in 2015.

So when Blockchain.com first went online, it was no wonder that it only displayed Bitcoin data, even though it had the name “blockchain” in its domain.

The Bitcoin Wallet of Blockchain.com

Blockchain.com was a huge success, so much so that it became the top Bitcoin explorer for a while. In fact, it was often seen as the “official” Bitcoin explorer, even though it wasn’t.

Given its success, at some point additional features were added to the site, mostly crypto services including a BTC wallet.

To be fair, the Blockchain.com wallet was a little odd, because it was a non-custodial online wallet, since it was the user who held the private keys.

In some ways it could not even be called a wallet in the strict sense, precisely because it did not contain the private keys. It was a kind of client software that allowed users to interact with the Bitcoin blockchain with their own private keys.

This solution had a problem because it effectively forced users to keep their private keys stored in plain text on the device they used to connect to the website. In fact, it was later overtaken by more secure solutions, such as software wallets or software hardware, and fell out of use.

It is important not to forget that the first Bitcoin wallets were software wallets that required the entire blockchain to be downloaded and often took hours, or even days, to install for the first time.

So until the time when nodeless standalone wallets were invented that connect to a server to download data from the blockchain, Blockchain.com’s solution made sense. In fact, it remained in use for several years.

It was later replaced by a standard custodial wallet.

The exchange

At some point, Blockchain.com also started offering its users trading services, thus effectively becoming a centralized exchange. At that time, it was necessary for the wallets to be custodial, and so the old wallet client was simply put aside.

Ever since a crypto exchange was integrated into Blockchain.com, the site also opened up to other cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum, Stellar, Solana and so on. At this time it also supports Dogecoin, Polkadot, Algorand, Uniswap Compound.

The site also offers more advanced crypto services, such as staking and an Earn program, as it now functions as a regular centralized exchange.

It also allows users to apply for a Visa card powered by cryptocurrencies stored in the custodial wallet.

The famous discoverer still exists, although it is now very different from what it was in the beginning and is certainly no longer considered, rightly or wrongly, as “official.”

The explorer now also supports other cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Ethereum, and offers much more information and many more charts than it once did.

The site also has a section dedicated to NFTs.

In other words, even though Blockchain.com started with very little functionality, and only for reference, over time it has become a rich website, full of features, and mainly based on a crypto exchange.

Operation of Blockchain.com

For these reasons, the operation of Blockchain.com’s wallet and exchange does not differ much from other exchanges.

What is still different is precisely the explorer, both because the other centrals generally do not have one built in, and because it is now one of the most comprehensive available.

All of this makes Blockchain.com one of the most comprehensive crypto websites in the world by far, especially due to the varied functionality it offers.

It is worth clarifying that as an exchange it is by no means among the largest, both because the trading volumes are not high at all, and because from this point of view it does not offer advanced features to professional traders who operate with large amounts of money. .

However, it offers services to institutional clients as well, notably custody, OTC trading and crypto lending. In other words, it is a website suitable for both small retail savers and institutional giants, but not suitable for professional or semi-professional traders.

It is worth noting that it has more than 1.3 million followers on Twitter, revealing that its main target group is precisely small retail investors. Suffice it to say that FTX’s Twitter profile, for example, has just over half that number.

The ratings

There was a time when Blockchain.com was very widely used. More precisely, while it certainly had far fewer users than it does now, it had a far greater market share, percentage-wise.

After all, in 2011 there were very few easy-to-use crypto services online, so it’s pretty obvious that the few that were there had very high market shares.

Even then, although the site was mostly working well, there was a lot of criticism surrounding it, especially with regards to customer support.

It is worth mentioning that very few people at the time knew how a wallet worked, or the blockchain, so many users were looking for only basic information that clogged their support service.

In addition, since the wallet was effectively non-custodial, issues unrelated to private key mis-storage were quite common. This meant that there were many problems with the use, often not due to the website, but the inexperience of the user, and their customer support was often dense.

Lately, however, the site has gotten a bad name due to several scammers who have decided to use it legitimately.

That is, Blockchain.com has nothing to do with scams or scammers, but some of them use it as a referral exchange because it allows them to get into the accounts of their unsuspecting victims who unknowingly give them access.

Negative reviews on Blockchain.com are practically countless, but they are almost never due to problems internal to the site or the exchange.

After all, those who give fraudsters access to their profile on an exchange are almost always inexperienced beginners who cannot even distinguish between the responsibility of the exchange itself, which in this case is almost zero, and those of the fraudsters who have nothing to do with the the exchange.

This is compounded by the fact that some fraudsters, obviously without permission, use the name and brand of Blockchain.com to convince victims to trust it, and this unfortunately further affects the undeserved bad reputation of this historic exchange.