Bitcoin.com Uses OneSignal to Create a Better Crypto Wallet Experience

Bitcoin.com is a financial services company that specializes in making cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin more accessible. In addition to publishing cryptocurrency news and educational resources, their main product is a digital cryptocurrency wallet called Bitcoin.com Wallet. The wallet was launched in 2017 as a mobile application designed to help users buy, sell, trade, and securely store cryptocurrency using encryption techniques. Although the company was originally focused on Bitcoin, their crypto wallet currently supports Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and Ethereum (ETH), and also offers a web-based digital wallet.

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a digital currency and the first-ever cryptocurrency created using a decentralized ledger system known as blockchain as a security mechanism. Although Bitcoin has not been widely backed by governments or banks as legal tender, its overwhelming popularity as a tradeable currency and means of person-to-person (P2P) payment has inspired new cryptocurrencies to emerge along with a variety of digital cryptocurrency wallets.

When Growth Product Manager Daria Dovzhikova joined Bitcoin.com, her main goals were to increase app usage and improve the overall product value. To meet those goals, she and her team spent their time building new app features and executing communication workflows.

At the time Daria joined, they were using Firebase Messaging Cloud to send push notifications and the limitations of that solution were making it difficult to meet their ambitious goals. Daria reflects,

“We constantly send price alerts to notify users about market movements. Every time we did this with Firebase, we were risking damaging our backend because as soon as we sent it [a notification], a lot of people start opening the application. The application starts asking the servers about the current balances and current prices, and that’s how we can damage the backend or even crash it. So we had to split the database somehow.”

As a workaround, her team used device type and geographic filters to segment their subscriber list and create different audience cohorts. Although doing so helped them stagger app traffic, it wasn’t an efficient or infallible long-term solution. Their subscriber list already included around four million devices, so manually splitting the database and sending notifications required a significant amount of time and effort.

“After the Android cohort responded, then we would wait five to ten minutes and send the same notification to the iOS cohort in the U.S., and so on. That approach required a lot of manual work and was still risky because our subscriber list was constantly growing,” recalls Daria.

The time-consuming nature of this approach also introduced additional risks. As Daria reflects, prices in crypto can change every ten minutes. So they had to double and triple check to make sure that they were sending relevant information.

As her team searched for a new messaging provider, this challenge was top of mind. They found their ideal solution in OneSignal’s Message Throttling feature, which allows companies to control how many messages are sent per minute in order to align traffic volume with server capacity.

In addition to the Message Throttling feature, Bitcoin.com’s app management team was looking for a solution that could help them expand their messaging strategy beyond push notifications and communicate more directly with engaged users via app interstitials. OneSignal’s in-app messaging product provided the perfect solution to expand their messaging options without over-extending their development resources.

OneSignal’s Amplitude integration was also a huge selling point because Daria's team already used Amplitude as their product analytics platform. They were excited about the possibility of syncing their databases in order to execute more personalized and automated messaging flows for different user cohorts.

“We wanted to automate the onboarding process and build out automated flows based on user behavior. For instance, if a user indicates that they want to buy some crypto, we want to automate the buy and sell messaging process so that we can better assist them during all of this.”

OneSignal’s product roadmap was also enticing. At the time, OneSignal was about to roll out their Journeys feature which would allow Daria to easily build and manage more intricate branching workflows spanning across every channel. They currently use a different solution for email marketing and email communications, but Daria suspects that both marketing and product teams would prefer to use one solution for all communications. "Doing so would make it easier to adjust the frequency or cadence so that we don’t overload a user — it’s easier to do in one platform rather than sending data and behavioral triggers through different platforms," says Daria.

After switching to OneSignal, Daria and her team experienced immediate benefits.

“With throttling feature alone, I was able to save myself half an hour a day where I don’t have to monitor whether we overloaded our backend or whether we are able to send another message. And our backend engineers are definitely happier.”

In addition to reducing overhead, adding OneSignal allowed her team to consolidate their tech stack. When they were using Firebase, they were also reliant on Branch to provide notification tracking and engagement data. With OneSignal’s built-in analytics capabilities and turn-key Amplitude integration, it’s been easier for her team to understand how and when users are interacting with messages.

“Currently all the notifications we send, we send them natively from OneSignal. We no longer need Branch links anymore to track which content was consumed more frequently or which was more popular — and that’s pretty great compared to all the steps that we did before.”

For the product team, having more sophisticated analytics also meant that they were able to see the impact of their work in a tangible way and learn from their achievements.

“We were able to generate more engagement with the product and were able to attribute some transactional messages to these campaigns, which we consider a huge success,” says Daria.

Because crypto is still a fairly new market, the Bitcoin.com app attracts users with a wide range of experience levels. For many app users, it’s their first experience possessing and storing digital currency. The Bitcoin.com wallet is a noncustodial wallet, which means that users have absolute ownership over their private keys. Although this option provides greater control and faster withdrawal than a non-custodial wallet, it also comes with greater responsibility. If a user loses their phone or forgets their key, fortunes can be irretrievably lost. To protect against that worst-case scenario, the Bitcoin.com wallet provides a cloud backup service with different password protection options. Users must activate this feature in the app in order to reap the benefits, so timely education is crucial to ensure feature adoption.

“We have a rule that we try to nudge people as much as possible to turn on the cloud backup because it is an invaluable feature in the product and it’s crucial for people who are less informed and knowledgeable about crypto. We try to use in-apps and pushes to educate them around the product so that they don’t lose access to their funds or their wallet.”

In addition to encouraging users to enhance their security, Daria and her team use in-app messages to continue to educate users, address pain points, and create a more seamless and positive app experience.

“We’re constantly meeting with the customer support team. For instance, if I get information that some users experience the same problem over and over and that problem is common for different cohorts, then we can send an in-app message to educate the user so that they don’t make that same mistake again.”

As with any financial app, real-time transactional notifications are imperative to Bitcoin’s app experience. In order for users to manage their funds and trade with confidence, they needed to know when funds move even after they close the app. Personalizing and automating these notifications requires touching personally identifiable information (PII) and sensitive financial data, so privacy and security are paramount.

To ensure the utmost privacy and accuracy of notifications, Bitcoin uses OneSignal’s robust API to automate and personalize transactional messages at scale. Daria explains, 

“When a person sends some significant amount of crypto, they wait patiently to get an alert about that…it’s crucial functionality and we love to avoid any manual work here.”

Although transactional messages are handled via the API, different messaging use cases such as user onboarding, educational campaigns, breaking news alerts, and market price updates are handled by Bitcoin.com’s product and marketing teams. 

As Daria explains, "the person who sends the price alerts and content is an Associate PM [Project Manager] rather than a developer" — which is why having a straightforward and customizable messaging dashboard has been a gamechanger for their team. In the past, creating app interstitials and personalizing notifications required developer support. With OneSignal, non-technical team members have been empowered to put ideas into action more quickly, which has expanded their marketing and engagement possibilities. 

Since adding OneSignal, they’ve created a new automated onboarding process and have already begun to think about how they can automate price alerts.

“We try to monitor the markets and once the market starts to change drastically in another direction, then we send price alerts regarding the changes and coin prices. We currently do it manually, but we already started working toward implementing automated alerts so that we can automatically pull market data and populate the push notification with that data,” says Daria.

As Bitcoin.com continues to evolve its app offerings, push notifications have proven to be a valuable resource. When they added a new shared wallet functionality to their app, they knew that reliable, real-time transactional notifications would be integral to the feature’s success. In order for the shared wallet to work successfully, two people must sign a transaction in order for it to be completed. As Daria explains,

“You might create a transaction, but then you need the other person to sign it. So that other person receives a push alert and they can tap the alert and automatically sign the transaction so that it can be fulfilled. That’s how shared wallets work and I think it’s also a great example of how we’re utilizing OneSignal to enhance our product.”

By implementing push notification campaigns around daily swaps and transactions, the Bitcoin.com team has driven measurable revenue growth.

All Notification Days:

• Avg. Daily Transaction Attempts: +15% vs. non-notification days
• Avg. Daily Completed Transactions: +11% vs. non-notification days
• Avg. Daily Swap Attempts: +19% vs. non-notification days
• Avg. Daily Confirmed Swaps: +40% vs. non-notification days

Campaign Days:

• Avg. Daily Transaction Attempts: +15% vs. non-notification days
• Avg. Daily Completed Transactions: +14% vs. non-notification days
• Avg. Daily Swap Attempts: +34% vs. non-notification days
• Avg. Daily Confirmed Swaps: +9% vs. non-notification days

Price Alert Days:

• Avg. Daily Transaction Attempts: +8% vs. non-notification days
• Avg. Daily Completed Transactions: +9% vs. non-notification days
• Avg. Daily Swap Attempts: +18% vs. non-notification days
• Avg. Daily Confirmed Swaps: +14% vs. non-notification days

News Days:

• Avg. Daily Transaction Attempts: +17% vs. non-notification days
• Avg. Daily Completed Transactions: +9% vs. non-notification days
• Avg. Daily Swap Attempts: +6% vs. non-notification days
• Avg. Daily Expired Swaps: -5% vs. non-notification days
• Avg. Daily Confirmed Swaps: +9% vs. non-notification days