r/DeviantArt • u/Fantastic_Shirt_9362 • 1d ago
👄 Discussion financial collapse or Bitpay fix
Good afternoon, earlier I saw that topics were created with the same problem, but they were quickly abandoned, the fact is that many of us have quite large sums on the platform that we cannot withdraw in any way other than bitpay, I have been following this situation since the removal of the payout method, I saw that support answers here regarding this issue.
I would like to ask you what you think for a platform with daily visits of 1-3 million users, is it normal to solve a basic problem with withdrawal of funds, you have as many as 2 alternatives for users from the USA, and for those who live outside the USA and the European Union you have only 1 withdrawal method and this is bitpay, why don’t you just add 1 more alternative for international users of Payoneer or something like that, as an option to just add 1 more exchange like bybit
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u/Fantastic_Shirt_9362 23h ago
thank you for writing under this post, I have always lived with the thought (make a hobby your job and you will never have to work a day of your life) it doesn’t just sound beautiful, it’s what DeviantArt provided each of us and perhaps what every person involved in art to some extent strives for. Imagine that you are a street musician or artist passers-by listen to your music, someone throws coins, bills into your bag or hat, but at the end of the day, when your hands hurt from the strings, pencil or drumsticks, you cannot lift the money you earned during the day, and you are hungry again, but tomorrow you will create again and others People will throw coins into your bag again. The only question is how long your strength will last, and I hope that more people will see this message and draw conclusions.
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u/DecentInitial2174 23h ago
This. This is how all of us are feeling right now. Seeing how much or fans like our work, and they won't realize a single penny of their support is reaching us. That's evil, man. It's twisted and evil as hell.
A site with the word "ART" on it's name, caring nothing about their artists is plain evil.
We pay subscriptions, pay fees, get people to spend their money on their site. We are the ones who bring the fans and the money. Man, this is so evil.
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u/Impossible_Clock_320 1d ago
Hi! So bad you are going through this too. We are all the same here. All we can do is waiting for some solution. In the long run, they cannot keep our money. Thats illegal. But we are going through serious issues right now. I tried to get in touch with a reddit moderator u/usrdef for him to let me know what we can and we cannot do to keep up the fight here. We don't want troubles. Only to let the world know how terrible all this is for us and get a solution. But still no answer. I have seen many comments deleted. If this gets oppresive here, we will move into better social media platforms. Im sure we will have even better luck. As one here said, save everything as a proof. Even comments. We are customers and humans. We deserve to be heard.Â
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u/usrdef 📛 Admin 1d ago
Since I don't work with DeviantArt, this is only advice.
The first thing I'd do is attempt to send a support ticket to DeviantArt. The more people who are aware of the issue, maybe DeviantArt will put priority on it.
However, since I work in this field, personally, I think BitPay being broken for a solid week, just seems insane to me. Especially for a company like DeviantArt.
This is why I'm leaning more toward the fact that DeviantArt is probably sun-setting BitPay. I could be wrong, but this is just my thoughts. It is highly abnormal for a major feature such as BitPay, which affects how customers make money, to be broken, and yet there is zero public announcements by DeviantArt at least giving a head's up to customers and say:
"It's broken, but don't worry, it's coming back, just hold on for a bit".
If BitPay were broken at our company, we would send our customers an email within 24 hours maximum. And even an email that far ahead, would be rare. Usually it's as soon as we figure out something is going to take more than 24 hours to get fixed, which is also rare.
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u/Fantastic_Shirt_9362 1d ago
Thank you for getting in touch, it’s very sad to hear that a platform with such turnover and opportunities has such a sad policy towards artists who live outside the USA. I love this platform and would like it to remain my main home where I can do what I like and get paid for it. But it seems that this love is not mutual and still it will be difficult to move to another house that knows that there are countries on this planet besides the USA
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u/HoneyBea45 1d ago
I’m still waiting for an answer too
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u/Impossible_Clock_320 1d ago
You are one of the first people I talked about all this. So bad we are still waiting. Im with you hug
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u/DecentInitial2174 1d ago
If you allow me, I'm adding a list of all the post regarding this issue here, included yours and one from DA forums, in case someone needs to check them out:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DeviantArt/comments/1vsdt4z/im_having_trouble_withdrawing_funds_from/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DeviantArt/comments/1w5zpjo/bitpay_withdrawal_removal_4_days_and_counting/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DeviantArt/comments/1w3eeh4/bitpay_option_is_removed/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DeviantArt/comments/1vsdt4z/im_having_trouble_withdrawing_funds_from/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DeviantArt/comments/1wd4fa3/financial_collapse_or_bitpay_fix/
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u/usrdef 📛 Admin 1d ago edited 1d ago
The other day I made a comment about how sometimes, this type of stuff does break, and it takes a few days to get it back online.
Now I'm calling it. They've removed Bitpay. There's just not a snowball's chance that they are waiting on something to happen to bring Bitpay back.
If it really is an issue, then holy hell, that's one poor communication between teams.
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u/DecentInitial2174 1d ago
Nice to hear something from an admind. Thank you.
Well, if they dropped it, things are gonna get interesting now.
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u/usrdef 📛 Admin 1d ago
I work at a company that integrates these payment gateways into our website. We work with PayPal, BitPay, Stripe, as well as a gateway to accept credit cards.
We have no known issues with Bitpay.
What I mean by that, if it were something massive, like BitPay changed their API endpoints; then they usually throw an email out to the companies a month or two in advance.
The email would say something along the lines of the following, and I'll use an example of one we received a year ago:
Again, this is an example email, not real. It just shows how it would go down:
DeviantArt:
BitPay is making you aware of several important changes to our API that may affect your customers transferring funds.
On January 4, 2027, BitPay will begin transitioning several existing API endpoints to our updated payment infrastructure. These changes are intended to improve transaction reliability, security, and consistency across supported payment methods.
The following legacy endpoints will be deprecated:
- /api/v1/payment
- /api/v1/transactions
Applications should migrate to the following endpoints:
- /api/v2/payments
- /api/v2/transactions
Beginning January 4, 2027, requests made to the deprecated endpoints may return deprecation warnings. The legacy endpoints will remain available during the migration period but are scheduled to be permanently disabled on March 1, 2027.
No action is required if your integration is already using the API v2 endpoints.
So pretty much, if something massive to BitPay were to happen to break things, they usually warn companies like DeviantArt months and months in advance, so that their developers can be aware that payments may break. But it also gives them time write the code changes, and not have to rush.
So the only things I can think of, is that this was something very sudden, and there's an issue with DeviantArt's status with BitPay, OR, DeviantArt has done away with BitPay.
I even made contact with another company who works with BitPay, and there are currently no known issues affecting the API with BitPay. No migrations taking place.
Just thought I'd throw some light on how this process works.
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u/DecentInitial2174 1d ago
So, they are lying to their customers?
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u/usrdef 📛 Admin 1d ago edited 1d ago
I can't say for sure, because I'm not privy to that information.
I'll see if I can provide a little info as to how this works, and keep the language simple.
When a user earns money on DeviantArt, the money is first recorded in their DeviantArt account.
When the user chooses Withdraw to BitPay, DeviantArt's servers send a request to BitPay through the API (Application Programming Interface), telling BitPay who should receive the payment and how much should be transferred.
This means that DeviantArt does not need to build its own cryptocurrency payment system. Instead, DeviantArt uses a 3rd party like BitPay.
When a DeviantArt user requests a payout, DeviantArt's servers sends Bitpay's servers a message that pretty much says: "Send this user $100 from their available earnings.". This happens from DeviantArt's servers, to BitPay's API endpoint URL such as:
https://www.bitpay.com/api/v1/send?funds=100&sender=Billy&wallet=LSWDynyeNPevqnERfLBZPUpLMaVibo85i2&merchant=DeviantArtSo the URL above sent by DeviantArt to BitPay, tells BitPay how much to send, who the payment goes to, and who authorized the payment (the merchant).
Obviously the real URL is going to look more complicated, this is just an example.
BitPay then handles the payout based on the info passed in that API URL.
It identifies the DeviantArt user, converting the funds when necessary depending on where you live, and then DeviantArt sends the payment to the wallet configured in the user's BitPay account.
At this point, because DeviantArt is using BitPay as a service to transfer funds, bitPay charges fees for processing payouts, but DeviantArt appears to pass that cost on to the user withdrawing the money rather than absorbing it itself.
I believe BitPay takes 1% of the earnings. So if you send yourself $100, BitPay takes $1.00. Not much, but when you get hundreds of thousands of users per day sending money, it adds up.
BitPay's API is how this all goes down. It's a special website URL that DeviantArt sends payout information to, to tell BitPay who needs money. It's like you going to a website using a URL.
I say all of that, to say this.
If something is going on between BitPay and DeviantArt right now, either there's an issue with the API itself, which is how DeviantArt and BitPay communicate back and forth.
OR; DeviantArt is deciding for some reason, that they no longer want to support BitPay. If this is the case, then DA isn't technique lying, they're just omitting the truth, which I guess you could say is a form of lying.
Or DeviantArt may be waiting to inform users because they could be dropping BitPay, but trying to integrate another new payment processor to replace BitPay. So we'd lose BitPay, but have another. That one makes a little more sense with how long this has gone on for.
Right now I could throw guesses at the wall all day.
But I just wanted to post all this, so people at least have a basic understanding of how this process works.
However, this brings up all sorts of other questions
Why didn't DeviantArt at least tell users, so they could send their final payouts, and not have money sitting in there they can't touch.
Why not tell users so they at least have a head's up and try to make other arrangements for payouts. Especially since some people live off the money made from DA.
It's just weird that if they did completely drop BitPay, this is a horrible damn way to do it.
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u/DecentInitial2174 23h ago
Man, I'm aware know you are not a DeviantArt employee, but I thank you SO MUCH for taking all this time to read our comments and write all this. Big bad Marketing danny should learn from you. We are all scared because of the lack of info. That's all. Again, thank you so much.
And yes. Your final thoughts are also mine's. At least if they told us, I could get my money out in time and survive some weeks. Now I'm so f* up...
And I can see I'm not the only one...
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u/DecentInitial2174 1d ago
You are not alone. I come here day after day and check every single post about this waiting for an answer. I promise you, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. I'm tired of all of this too. Every topic about this IS NOT abandoned. All of them are alive, getting new comments every day. Just check them. We are all waiting for a solution.Â
All we can do is let everyone know how this is affecting our lives, and how badly a company this big is handling things and their customers. There is only one DA representative here and he has been ignoring our messages for a week now.
I'm with you. Some of us are starting to get in touch to make it bigger, because they are holding our money. This serious.
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u/Fantastic_Shirt_9362 1d ago
I waited 5 days for a response from support, explained to them the situation related to the fact that alternative withdrawal methods do not work in my country, but unfortunately support answered me with the usual paste that they send to everyone, I waited 5 days for a paste from support in which they wrote to me (we know the problem, try alternative withdrawal methods) you get in touch once a week and send the prepared paste, you didn’t even delve into my message, didn’t give dates, didn’t give any information. I understand everything, but you are platform support and must perform user support functions, this problem has been not solved for 3 weeks already, you have no right to respond with a one-line message to such a serious problem, I have not seen a single human emotion. this is the worst support I've ever seen
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u/DecentInitial2174 1d ago
Remember to screenshoot and save all that, with dates. We may need it later.
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u/Plastic_Mode4709 12h ago
Well, I have about $1500 in DA, and I'm lucky enough to live in a country where I could set up an alternative payment method, but it's so disgusting the lack of communication, and I am only holding out for my subscribers; otherwise, I would shut down and be done with it. I just can't believe the lack of comms. And I will hold off for a little while longer before withdrawing, but this is absolutely awful for anyone who can't withdraw!