Shutting down our Telegram Channel

A difficult decision of discontinuing a strong medium of communication

With regret and disappointment, we would like to inform our users that we have decided to shut down our Telegram Channel ‘Koinex — Indian Crypto Exchange’, effective December 4, 2017 at 03.00 PM IST.

The Telegram Channel, which began as a baby step to gather around the most enthusiastic cryptocurrency traders and blockchain buffs, quickly became the largest community in India. With over 5.7K subscribers, ‘Koinex — Indian Crypto Exchange’ was home to discussions, debates, analyses and humour around everything cryptocurrency and blockchain. The vision was to nurture it into a cradle of knowledge and information, spreading awareness, familiarity, comfort and confidence in this fast growing nascent space. However, it ended up being something entirely different.

Reasons for making the difficult decision

The signs of a wrong motivation and a wrong angle breeding in the community began appearing on one of our most intriguing features ‘Koin Chat’. Koin Chat was a mini Telegram Channel of sorts, with more or less the same objective. The admins enjoyed solving queries, addressing issues, fostering interesting discussions, all at one place. But soon Koin Chat converted into a messy public chat room with inappropriate conversations, instances of misguiding people, unacceptable behaviour and went as far as abusive targeting.

We chose to shut down Koin Chat with a heavy heart, because it was a dear feature to the team and a substantial bunch of our users who wanted it to continue.

The Telegram Channel — even after strong supervision and moderation — headed towards the same fate. We would like to list down some of the most pressing reasons why it became infeasible to continue the Channel:

Unacceptable behaviour: Some users resorted to abusive language, inappropriate targeting and unnecessarily creating panic or FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) among peers and other community members.
Unacceptable content: Some users began posting vulgar links, phishing links, irrelevant posts, spamming links among other unacceptable content. This created an unlikeable environment for a lot of users, the complaints of which came to the team every now and then.
Fake pumps and dumps: Some users utilized the Channel to orchestrate fake pumps and dumps, trying hard to make money the wrong way.
Misguiding peers: Some users took advantage of newcomers to the space (or the Channel or the platform Koinex) and misguided them towards making wrong decisions early on in their trading activities.
Promoting other platforms: Though it was supposed to be an open and transparent community, the Channel was still a community of Koinex users. Some users took the opportunity to promote other platforms, smear the reputation of Koinex (going as far as calling the team a complete cheat, fraud and scam) and deliberately tried to defame the platform.

What’s next

On December 4, 2017 at 03.00 PM IST, we will shut down the ‘Koinex — Indian Crypto Exchange’ Telegram Channel. This decision is a difficult one, and looks permanent given the current situation. Another Channel called ‘Koinex Announcements’ will continue to exist as a medium for instant communication about major updates, upgrades and information (however, no users are allowed to post anything on the Channel).

The users will now have to rely on publicly available information from several sources to make their informed decisions about cryptocurrency trading, and will also need to find or build a new community using an appropriate medium henceforth. We are not liable to be a part of such groups or Channels.

Alert: Using Koinex name to create a new Channel will be treated as an infringement of our brand and copyright, and appropriate legal action may be taken against the people involved.

We sincerely hope that we find ourselves in a position to resurrect such community building efforts from scratch and invite every cryptocurrency or blockchain enthusiast to be a part of the same. We also hope that the interactions on our current Telegram Channel provided for an interesting platform, at the least.

As usual, we expect your kind support and cooperation in our decisions which are aimed at building a holistic and favourable cryptocurrency trading ecosystem in India. We will continue to find ways in which we can bring people together and push the development and adoption of the technology and the space as much as possible.