Brawker CEO Cyril Houri Departs in Management Shakeup

CEO Cyril Houri has left bitcoin buying service Brawker following a management shakeup.

The decentralised platform, which allows bitcoin users to buy "almost anything" online at a discount, is now operated by its two-person development team.

Speaking to CoinDesk, the serial entrepreneur said the departure – on "very friendly terms" – would give him more time at location technology firm Navizon, which he founded 10 years ago. He added:

"I am still very interested in the cryptocurrency space and will still keep my eyes open in case I come across another interesting project."

Gabriel Majoulet, one of the developers behind Brawker, said that the platform's technology would remain unaltered.

"We will keep maintaining the product the way it is, and focus our work on what makes it a good product: the multi-signature implementation. It is something that the community wants."

Unlike other implementations, which split keys on company servers, the two private keys used in Brawker transactions are held by the parties themselves. This, Majoulet says, offers superior security to users, as there is no way Brawker – and, by extension, hackers – can access funds in escrow.

This week the company also experienced "a chain of unforeseen problems" that interrupted transactions during a migration to a new server. However, the development team insist these issues, which centred around fees, have now been resolved.

Both Majoulet and Houri denied the outage had any connection to the company's restructuring. Majoulet added: "We will do the support ourselves, we are still learning, but defining new processes today."

Image via Payments Source.