TL DR; Life got in the way and  we will not able to work on Woodwallets.io with the same level of passion and dedication we used to. Instead of just running it like a boring online shop, we decided to suspend operations. If you happen to know someone who can be interested in picking up the business and run it with passion, . Bitcoin accepted.

It all started just for fun one year ago, with a reddit post titled “I have a lasercutter in my hands for a couple of months. Would you be interested in wooden paper wallets?” . The response was overwhelming.

After a month of prototyping and setups, I sneaked into the World Mobile Congress to personally hand the first wallet to Jon Matonis, then president of the Bitcoin Foundation. And here were are, one year and several hundreds Woodwallets later, facing a hard decision.

During Woodwallets‘s first and only year we have transformed a no-budget bizarre idea into a profitable business with a very solid reputation in the crypto-currency space (EDIT: this story is now on coindesk) . We always refused to get a “paid review of your product” in the bitcoin press – and I assure there was no shortage of “special offers” in our inbox. Yet we have been able to reach the bitcoin community at large, building trustful relations with our loyal customers. I still get surprised when I show the product at local events/meetups to find out that a decent number of  people already knows it.

By putting energy and dedication in delivering a product for bitcoiners, we have been able to focus on what really matter : making the community happy with the product. The feedback we received from Woodwallets buyers can attest that we hit the target.

Beside  being a an elegant piece of design, Woodwallets also helped in raising awareness about cryptocurrency in general and cold storage practices. A good ice-breaker for face2face introduction to cryptos, it also allowed for the creation of open source BIP38 encryption tools like bippy, pushing a bit over the boundary of bitcoin security and infrastructure.

However, it is now time for us to move on. Life sometimes gets in the way, and we  realized we won’t have enough time for running Woodwallets with the same level of dedication that brought us where we are now. We can’t afford anymore to spend nights soldering thousands of free bitcoin keychain rings for a conference by hand. We won’t be able anymore to experiment with new materials, research into new products, play with multisig, be active on social networks, promptly respond to emails and follow the altcoin scene while keeping keep up with this extremely fast-paced space.

Not being able to invest time in such activities will make Woodwallets just an ordinary, average and boring business. And we do not want to upset the (almost) one thousand amazing twitter followers and fans. Instead, we took the decision to stop taking new orders, with immediate effect.

We would be more than happy to leave everything we built so far in the hands of a company or an individual who is capable of running it with the same level of passion -possibly even more – that we kept during this year. If you think you are that person, or you know someone who might be the one, please get in touch or help us by spreading this message

And no, we will not conclude this message with a Bitcoin address begging for donations. Never did. Just two simple words, in the name of all the people who at some point collaborated in this project : thank you.

Whatever happens now, we will keep a good memory

Sincerely, Nico