Paxful’s Ray Youssef Aims to Work with Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey’s Crypto Firm for P2P Marketplace

Paxful co-founder Ray Youssef plans to use Jack Dorsey’s crypto firm TBD to launch a decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) crypto trading platform.

The new venture, called Civilization Kit (Civ Kit), will be built on Nostr, a decentralized network protocol for distributed and free social networking systems, according to the project’s white paper released last month. 

The launch of Civ Kit comes shortly after Youssef’s P2P bitcoin marketplace, Paxful, which was popular in countries such as Nigeria and Kenya, shut down amidst regulatory pressure and internal conflicts. 

Civ Kit intends to create a network of decentralized, non-custodial bitcoin marketplaces, which could reach thousands, Youssef said during a recent episode of The Scoop, a weekly interview podcast by crypto media The Block. 

He claimed that Civ Kit will lead to thousands of plug-and-play P2P marketplaces around the world, adding that the decentralized identity tech developed by Jack Dorsey’s company TBD would play an important part in the process.

A person familiar with the matter told CryptoNews that Paxful’s Ray Youssef held “an informational call” with a member of TBD’s open source team several months ago, but has not partnered with the company.

“We have not had any subsequent or ongoing conversations with him,” the person who asked not to be named said.

“Furthermore, our business development team has never spoken to Ray, and we are not working with or partnering with either him or any of his companies.” 

Previously, Youssef had called Civ Kit “the next evolution of Bitcoin.” 

“We spent millions on compliance, but even that still wasn’t enough,” he said in an interview. 

“And then to make things worse, in the middle of January, my co-founder decided to sue the company and myself. The litigation got really nasty and he scared away our best people. My entire chief level staff resigned. I had no operational staff.”

Paxful Shuts Down Amid Internal Conflicts

Paxful was founded in 2015 and facilitated P2P crypto trading, meaning users exchanged Bitcoin for cash, gift cards, mobile money, and other forms of currency through the platform. 

In early April, the marketplace announced that it is suspending operations following internal conflicts between Youssef and Paxful’s co-founder Artur Schaback. 

More specifically, the latter accused Youssef of shutting him out of the operation, withholding key details about the platform’s business dealings, and making fraudulent fund transfers.

Paxful has encouraged users to move their funds to non-custodial wallets or other platforms, such as the newly-created Noones P2P bitcoin marketplace.

Noones offers similar functionality to Paxful, including wallet, listing service, marketplace, and escrow, with Lightning Network functionality set to become available in a few weeks.

Civ Kit, however, intends to go further than Noones and Paxful, enabling anyone to build a decentralized Bitcoin-based marketplace on top of its ecosystem, Youssef said. 

“It is possibly the most exciting thing since Bitcoin. This will allow anyone – community or nation state – to build their own decentralized marketplace. My dream is that there are 1,000 options running all over the world.”

Editorial note (May 11, 10:00 AM EST): The title of this article was updated to reflect the fact that Paxful’s Ray Youssef has not partnered with Square’s TBD, rather just inquired about building on the technology.