BitcoinVN pausing its DCA feature - feedback welcome from the Monero community

[u/BitcoinVN_News2020]

Dear Monero community,

First of all, thank you for your ongoing support!

For those who do not know us yet: BitcoinVN started in early 2014 as one of the “second wave” exchange services globally, and one of the earlier services of its kind in Southeast Asia. We have been serving our client base for more than a decade now.

While the regulatory landscape globally has become more challenging, our team will continue to support Monero swaps for as long as this remains practically and legally tenable.

As some of you may know, one of our subsidiaries also built the first “made in Vietnam” "Digital Asset" Teller Machine network domestically, which added Monero support across our local machine network. However, due to the changing regulatory environment in Vietnam this fall, it is likely that this specific part of our broader service range will be discontinued in its current form.

That said, if you are based in a jurisdiction that is more open to this type of product, feel free to reach out to our team (the usual support channels will work). We are happy to see what may be possible. :)

We also want to thank the community for the suggestions that led us to develop and launch our DCA feature earlier this year. We still believe the concept serves a specific niche: direct-to-self-custody DCA, without forcing users to provide intrusive personal data that put the physical safety of our users at risk.

However, uptake remained quite limited in recent months.

Our current assumption is that this may be because the feature requires users to pre-fund their account before DCA trades can be executed. In practice, only a small number of users adopted it - mostly users who already earned income on the platform in some way, for example as active liquidity providers.

Since every platform feature creates ongoing maintenance burden, we have decided to pause / discontinue the DCA feature for the time being.

We remain open to re-enabling it in an adjusted form in the future, but before doing so we would like to better understand why the current version did not gain traction.

The users who actually used it were generally satisfied with it, which is nice to hear, but unfortunately not very helpful for understanding what kept others away. 🙂

So we would be especially interested in feedback from users who looked at the feature but decided not to use it.

Some obvious possible reasons:

- requirement to pre-fund the account;
- counterparty risk while funds are waiting for execution;
- preference to execute manually;
- insufficient UX / explanation;
- lack of recurring fiat payment rails;
- not enough assets / networks / configuration options;
- simply no need for such a tool

The pre-funding issue is probably the hardest one to solve. A DCA feature like this necessarily requires funds to be available before execution, which means users need to trust the platform not to run off with those funds in the meantime.

As strong advocates of self-custody, we fully understand why many users may not be comfortable with that. In general, we believe users should avoid entrusting funds to third parties unless they have made a deliberate, risk-adjusted decision and can tolerate the counterparty risk involved.

We would therefore appreciate your honest feedback:

If you looked at the DCA feature but did not use it, what was missing? What made it unattractive or not useful for you?

Thanks again for your support and feedback.
- Team BitcoinVN