We are excited to announce the release of account wallets! A new and improved way to pay and get paid on Bitify. We have also improved auction bids to give sellers more confidence that bids are commitments to pay for won auctions.

Account Wallets

From today, all payments to sellers and refunds to buyers will be deposited into a wallet within your account, rather than being sent directly to your external wallet address. You are free to use these funds to make additional purchases or withdraw them any time you wish. This will save users thousands of mBTC in network fees.

Account wallets will appear as a new menu below your account drop down and on the left menu below your account panel. From within the wallets page, you will be able to see all deposit and withdrawal transactions as well internal transactions such as purchases, sales, refunds, and funds reserved for an auction bid.

Buyers, you are now able to deposit any amount you want into your wallet and pay for multiple items from your available balance. Any refunds for purchases will be credited to your wallet, giving you the choice to withdraw your funds from the site to your external wallet, or reuse them towards other purchases on the site.

Sellers, you now can list items for $1 or less should you wish to and be certain that the network transaction fees will not eat into your profits. You will be able to accumulate hundreds of sales in your wallets and withdraw your profits all at once, paying only a single transaction fee on the amount withdrawn. You will also have the option to purchase stock from other sellers on the site using the same funds.

Bitcoin withdrawals will be processed within 30 minutes (down from 8 hours) and Litecoin withdrawals will continue to be instant (subject to size restrictions). Account wallets is still in a beta phase, and we look forward to your feedback on how we can better improve this feature.

Auction Deposits

Some sellers had reached out to us regarding buyers bidding on items but not paying for it at the close of the auction. While we have only had a small number of cases where this has occurred, we believe giving our sellers confidence that bidders will pay for the item is a necessity.

From today, all auction bids will require a 10% deposit on the bid being placed.

For example, if a buyer is placing a bid on an item for $100, then a $10 deposit will be required. Bidders can fund the deposit from their account wallet if funds are available, or they may deposit funds into their wallet and use them towards the auction deposit.

Due to the nature of this feature, bidders are now required to choose a currency to bid with. If you are a bidder wishing to pay with Bitcoin at the close of an auction, then you would select Bitcoin as your bid currency. 10% of your maximum bid amount will be reserved from your available balance to use towards the auction.

For example, user “A” places a $1,000 bid in Bitcoin for an item that is currently sitting at $100 and deposits $200 (20% of the total bid) in their wallet. The amount of $100 (10%) will be reserved in the wallet towards the auction. The auction function will increase the current bid value on the item to $104. User “B” bids on the item for $300, the system will then auto-bid for user “A” the amount of $310. User “C” places a bid of $600 on the item, the system will then place an auto-bid for user “A” for $615. This process will continue until the $1,000 is reached, after which the new highest bidder’s bid is on the top. User “A” will be notified that they have been outbid. User “A” can then use the total amount in their wallet ($200 initial deposit) to place another bid for a maximum amount of $2,000 on the item, where the auction function will trigger the bidding war as above until a new bidder is crowned the winner of the auction.

Should the bidder win the auction, the amount reserved towards their bid will be used towards the final payment and they will only be required to deposit the difference into their account at the end of the auction.

If a winning bidder is subsequently outbid by another user, their deposit will be immediately released back into their wallet. No need to wait until the auction ends to get your deposit back! We have also changed the increments at which bids can be placed.

Note: We recommend that bidders deposit the full amount they are willing to pay for an item to avoid having to make multiple deposits and be charged a miner fee on each deposit.

Note: We recommend that bidders deposits the full amount they are willing to pay for an item to avoid having to make multiple deposits and be charged a miner fee on each deposit.

We are working on some great features to enhance user communication between each other and to allow sellers to set custom shipping fee for each country/region. We are also working on adding additional layers of security and an improved multi factor authentication system to allow for self-service MFA resets and verification.

We look forward to sharing more exciting news with you soon.