Snapchat’s Snapcash, a peer-to-peer service for transferring funds, is shutting down. The company said the service will shut down on August 30.
“Snapcash was our first product created in partnership with another company – Square. We’re thankful for all the Snapchatters who used Snapcash for the last four years and for Square’s partnership,” a spokeserson said in a statement to TechCrunch.
Snapchat’s Snapcash was originally launched in 2014 when Snapchat was at the peak of its popularity. It was announced and launched before Instagram implemented its Stories feature, which is extremely similar to the stories found on Snapchat. However, Snapchat now has a tough time stealing attention from Instagram, which continues to grow and implement new features for its users. Moreover, Google, Facebook, Apple and many other major companies have started implementing services for transferring money.
Snapchat didn’t provide any additional details on Snapcash being shut down. However, it’s likely that the service didn’t gain much popularity, as Venmo continued to grow during a time when Google, Apple, and Facebook started adding peer-to-peer payment options to their operating systems and networks.
Furthermore, TechCrunch suggests that Snapchat’s Snapcash was being used to pay for erotic content online. According to the tech blog, some Twitter users reportedly promoted explicit photos and exchanged them with Snapcash payments. If you performed a quick search for “Snapcash” on Twitter, tweets suggesting erotic content and offers requesting sexually explicit snaps for payment through the feature would surface. Snap’s track record for security may not be reliable enough to be trusted with the types of personal information users were providing. That said, it could be wiser for Snapchat to let go of its peer-to-peer payment platform before it runs into problems.
Earlier this month, TechCrunch discovered that Snapchat’s code contained the code-name “eagle” for a certain project, which could be a camera search feature. The new design apparently lets users scan an object or a barcode using their Snapchat camera to discover product results in apps like Amazon. However, TechCrunch notes that since this news was originally reported, the Amazon mentions have disappeared from the code.
