Engineering confidence in crypto: Inside Bitcoin.com’s messaging stack

An eye-opening look at what happens when you stop emailing disengaged users

Industry

Financial

Use case

Confirmations & updates
Feature adoption
Retention
Cross-sell & upsell

Messaging channel

Mobile push notifications
Email
In-app messaging

Region

North America
Global

Key takeaways

• +30% increase in conversions
• +67% boost in opens (while targeting significantly fewer users!)
• Record-setting email reputation + deliverability through event-based targeting

Making crypto make sense

Bitcoin.com is a global crypto platform focused on making cryptocurrency accessible and usable for everyday users. Operating in a highly volatile market, Bitcoin.com supports millions of users across buying, swapping, rewards, and wallet-based experiences.

The company follows a strongly product-led growth philosophy. The product itself drives adoption, but messaging plays a critical role when it comes to long-term retention—helping users complete complex actions, avoid friction, and feel supported at key moments in their journey.

The push problem no one told you about

Bitcoin.com began exploring OneSignal in 2021 as its user base and infrastructure scaled.

At the time, push notifications were sent through Firebase. The main limitation was scale: sending notifications to all users at once risked overloading backend servers. To compensate, notifications had to be sent in batches by country or cohort, which was manual, inefficient, and risky.

As the product matured into more enterprise-grade infrastructure, the team also wanted:

• Smarter targeting
• Better segmentation
• Support for more complex, behavior-driven user flows

Later, as email became a more important channel, another challenge emerged. Without a practical way to exclude inactive users, email campaigns were sent broadly, which negatively affected email domain reputation and deliverability.

Bitcoin.com needed reliable infrastructure, cross-channel orchestration, and targeting based on real engagement—not volume.

Messaging that actually knows what users mean

Bitcoin.com adopted OneSignal as its centralized customer messaging platform and expanded usage over time.

Sending push without the backend crash

The team started with push notifications, then added in-app messages. OneSignal’s throttling capability allowed them to send high-volume notifications safely without overwhelming backend systems.

Read the full Bitcoin.com case study to find out how their growth product team immediately got a half hour of their days back (and made their backend engineering team very happy in the process.)

Helping users cross the conversion chasm

Journeys became the primary way Bitcoin.com supported users through complex, high-intent flows—especially when users showed clear buying intent by tapping the Buy button.

Journeys were used to:

• Increase conversion by guiding users through KYC completion
• Reduce drop-off by addressing failed KYC attempts with clear guidance on what went wrong and how to fix it
• Accelerate purchase completion by prompting users to finish buying after KYC
• Recover revenue through abandoned purchase and abandoned swap journeys
• Prevent churn by intervening when transactions fail, providing next-step instructions

These journeys typically combined push notifications and email, escalating to in-app messages when the action was critical and earlier messages were ineffective.

How Message Events within Segmentation became Bitcoin.com’s North Star

For email specifically, Bitcoin.com adopted OneSignal Events to improve targeting.

Before Message Events within Segmentation, the team struggled to exclude inactive users in a practical way. With Message Events within Segmentation, they could segment users based on recent engagement—such as users who had opened at least one email in the past 90 days—and target only those audiences.

Message Events within Segmentation were configured directly in the OneSignal UI using built-in segmentation.

Once this Message Events within Segmentation feature was added, we could target only active users. Our email reputation had been dropping. But as soon as we started using that, it started climbing and now it’s actually the highest it’s been.

Results

Small lifts, big compound gains

By supporting users through critical flows using coordinated push, email, and in-app messaging, Bitcoin.com saw an estimated ~30% increase in conversions.

While incremental at first glance, this improvement compounded over time, contributing to stronger customer lifetime value, engagement, and retention across the product.

The domain reputation increased, which increased our deliverability, which as a result increased the engagement on our emails.

Winning the relevance game: Email deliverability & engagement improvements from Message Events within Segmentation

Using Message Events within Segmentation to target only active users led to measurable improvements:

• Email domain reputation increased to its highest level
• Improved reputation led directly to better deliverability
• Engagement increased despite sending to a smaller audience

Key outcomes observed:

• Opens increased from ~300K to ~500K
• These results were achieved while targeting significantly fewer users than before
• The absolute number of clicks was higher with a reduced, active list than when sending to millions of users

This reinforced a core insight: relevance outperformed reach.

Fewer tickets, more triumphs

• Journeys and segmentation reduced dependence on engineering for campaign execution
• Teams could create segments, sync data, and launch messaging independently
• Integration with tools like Amplitude enabled faster experimentation and iteration

In many cases, campaigns that were previously impractical to set up became feasible once OneSignal was in place.

A messaging philosophy worth its weight in trust

Bitcoin.com is explicit about the role of messaging:

Messaging does not drive growth. The product does. Messaging supports growth by helping users succeed within the product, reducing friction, and reinforcing habit-forming features such as rewards and streaks.

The goal is for messaging to feel supportive and helpful, not promotional or pushy.

Next stop: Behavior-driven brilliance

As Bitcoin.com continues to grow, the next focus is on smarter, more predictive messaging using behavioral patterns to identify when high-value users may disengage and proactively support them.

The team emphasizes that strong data infrastructure is essential to unlocking this next level of value from messaging.