P2P Bitcoin marketplaces are an important way for users to move money across borders, but their future depends on becoming unstoppable and permissionless, according to Paxful’s Ray Youssef. Youssef, alongside Nicolas Gregory and Antoine Riard, is developing CivKit, a P2P marketplace that will use the technology of Nostr and the Lightning network to power a decentralized platform allowing censorship resistance and permissionless trading between peers. The system will use the Nostr protocol for its P2P order book and rely on the Bitcoin network as a source of truth for its “web-of-stakes” market ranking paradigm. Trades will be locked under Bitcoin contracts to remove reliance on third parties for dispute arbitration while market nodes will be incentivized by privacy-preserving service credentials backed by BTC payments. The aim of the market system is to enable global trade of any kind of item around the world, including fiat currencies, goods and services.P2P marketplaces are popular but perceived as niche within the Bitcoin ecosystem. Binance’s P2P marketplace is now the biggest player in the ecosystem, and private conversations with Binance’s founder CZ suggest that the offering remains a top earner for the global cryptocurrency exchange’s business. The impetus for the creation of CivKit is partly born over fears of the potential closure of P2P platforms like Binance’s, as well as regulatory challenges that led to the temporary suspension of Paxful’s services in April 2023. P2P marketplaces need to be built in ways that makes them “unstoppable” and “permissionless”, as LocalBitcoins was closed in Feb. 2023 and Paxful faced regulatory challenges. P2P exchanges have faced significant regulatory scrutiny and uncertainty in countries like America.
| Information |
Details |
| Geography |
Global |
| Countries |
🇫🇷 🇬🇪 🇺🇸 🇫🇮 |
| Sentiment |
neutral |
| Relevance Score |
8 |
| People |
Ray Youssef, Nicolas Gregory, Antoine Riard, Joe Hall, Changpeng Zhao |
| Companies |
Paxful, LocalBitcoins, Binance, Nostr, Lightning Network |
| Currencies |
Bitcoin, Ethereum, USD, EUR, Binance. |
| Securities |
None |
