1Broker was active between November 9th, 2012 and September 27th, 2018. The trading platform allowed users to trade on various financial markets (popular stocks like AAPL or MSFT, commodities like Gold, Forex markets, ...) with Bitcoin as the settlement currency.
It quickly became popular in the cryptocurrency community and proved itself to be a stable and trusted service with more than 70,000 registered users.

In September 2018, two US regulatory agencies (SEC and CFTC) filed, without any prior communication, civil lawsuits against the company and its CEO, Patrick Brunner. Basically, the lawsuits alleged that 1Broker violated US security laws. The company and the team behind 1Broker did not have a connection with the United States; jurisdiction was claimed because customers from the United States were using our trading platform (~18% of our customers came from the US).
On the same day, the internet domain 1broker.com was taken over and redirected to a US government splash page.

In March 2019, we settled the lawsuits without admitting or denying the allegations of the legal complaints and agreed to pay a fine and disgorgement for the transactions involving US residents. In early 2022, we regained access to the domain 1broker.com.

Although our users encouraged us to continue offering our services, shutting down 1Broker was unavoidable. 1Broker was operated in good faith and we were not accustomed to legal issues of any kind - especially not lawsuits from US government agencies.
Handling these legal procedures while offering our services at the same time was impossible due to our limited resources.
Customers were able to withdraw their funds via the alternative domain 1broker.io until the end of 2019.