YellowPay, a funded bitcoin payments company built for The Middle East and North Africa, has ceased its operations for undisclosed reasons, members of its founding team told CoinDesk.

Founded in 2014, the company, the first industry startup in the Middle East by some accounts, aimed to build tools to make Bitcoin payments easy, risk-free, and accessible to everyone.

Last May, YellowPay brought in former managing director for PayPal Elias Ghanem as a senior advisor. This announcement, however, marks the last update on the official blog post.

Sources familiar with the matter told CoinDesk that despite traction, the company faced issues with its business model. This included YellowPay’s continued emphasis on the benefits of cryptocurrencies for online payments – something which saw decreasing support from industry and investors.

The news comes amid the Dubai government showing increasing interest in blockchain technology and digital currencies. Keynote Events 2016 recently announced its first blockchain technology conference to be held at Burj Al Arab in Dubai on May 30, 2016. The conference will see a number of investors and government officials from the region and will focus on the blockchain, Bitcoin, investing, regulations, startups, the Internet of Things, growth hacking, and more.

No official announcement has been made by YellowPay at the time of writing.