Home
News
Paxful is a crypto assets exchange that offers its services to a global audience. It is one of the leading peer-to-peer finance platforms. The platform aims to make Bitcoin easier for everyone, from businesses to merchants. The marketplace connects both buyers and sellers for business. Moreover, Paxful simplifies sending money around the world in a fast o and cheap way. More than 300 payment methods are available on the platform in the current scenario, which helps individuals find more suitable offers. Additionally, Paxful’s users get an escrow system and full control of their funds with dedicated 24/7 customer support.
Recently, Saurav Bhattacharjee of The Coin Republic interviewed Artur Schaback, the co-founder and COO of Paxful. The session covered Schaback’s experience with building such an empire. Moreover, Schaback also discussed their literacy approach and other features of the platform.
Artur’s experience with the growth of Paxful?
It’s an interesting one, because, you know, in the beginning, we could not imagine what it would turn into, but we still have had the same goal since the beginning. Like we help the little guy because Bitcoin is peaceful money, and that’s how white Paxful is also called in Latin “pacts” means “peace”. So we’re peaceful because we’re for a more peaceful world, and Bitcoin is actually helping achieve that.
Bitcoin is people’s money, people’s currency. So, in the beginning, we just thought, how can we get more Bitcoin? I mean, how can we get Bitcoin into more people’s hands. And we looked at the competitors and decided, hey, the marketplace model will work the best. And it started to evolve, and we started to look at our users. We are always getting feedback from them, and we’ll listen to them. So one of our values is to stay connected to the streets, which means, you know, always talking to them, if they’re right beside, you know, support or some feedback, always listen to that.
So, and that’s what made us evolve. From the beginning, the marketplace evolved. We added more payment methods or wallets evolved, always making it simple to use for people.
You know, we are more like tech-savvy people who will figure things out, but other people will not figure things out if it’s a product built only for tech people. So our goal is to make it as simple as possible.
Paxful’s approach towards crypto literacy?
There are many things in that. It’s not, you know, it’s not just this like so one simple problem. It’s a few things like people don’t, then those who don’t have crypto but have heard of this. Why don’t they have it? Maybe they’re afraid they haven’t heard it’s a scam or it can be stolen. That’s one type of content we have. You know, we have to explain to people why, how crypto is beneficial to you with examples like how Paxful is benefiting people? And then how can you protect your crypto, this kind of educational content.
And yeah, I think honestly, it’s like, with any new technology, you need to make education. I mean, education is the key to anything new for people. Like It personally took me six months to understand, like in 2013, how Bitcoin works by trying by, you know, by reading by trying a little bit, and then like, oh, okay, that’s how it works. Right? It’s like, suddenly you start realizing, so same with the DeFi right now, for me, it took me again, a little bit less, but still, it took me some time.
Paxful’s pure and trader rewards program
So we have peers, they’re basically like affiliates. But more than that. Their job is to promote crypto and Paxful like educating how to use backfill, and they get on top for every new person some money, so that’s one. You know, everybody’s welcome to become apparent, and you will get access to like, new features to do the mouse, you know, you can potentially get a job at Paxful, we have that opportunity to, and it has happened.
So it’s basically like a community of affiliates where you’re more heavily involved with Paxful. and promoting it and features and how it can be useful for different use cases. So the trader program is basically when you’re a power trader, and you basically have your own business. You don’t really work as an affiliate, but you just work to expand your business.
So we’re going to give you more discounts, like, it’s a pretty standard thing that the more volume you do then, the more discounts you get. And, you know, you get like, no mutations, where the new users are nice to have like security deposits, but you don’t need to have them because you have proven yourself.
Cryptocurrency revolution has begun
I think that crypto is giving people a choice. And when the actual government is actually recommending that crypto is good, it starts people to think and think, but to think that, hey, if the government is promoting good, it must be good for me, right? It must be good for my day to day financial means or for my investment, and it must be safe. So this is a good positive development.
And in terms of Paxful, as well, because you know, our model is a Peer-to-Peer marketplace, the more different buyers and sellers we have in each region like El Salvador and Nigeria, the better we can connect with each other financially. And it’s going to be cheaper than transfers or some other remittance services.
How does a corporate account badge help grow startups?
We help the little guy, which is what we are doing, but then there’s also big corporations who are doing a lot of volumes doing bigger amounts and bigger trades, you know, they’re doing some e-commerce or export-import between different countries. And suppose you just want to trade or buy or sell under your company. In that case, you can get onboarded easily. It took us some time to implement this, if compared to competitors, like how to onboard as a corporate account, you know, our competitors are hell, it’s like you have to write to support tickets like back and forth. But we made it simple. It is just the form you have to fill out. Like, but you know, then you just wait.
So it’s more like, I automated easier, like less back and forth. And that’s what I mean, that even grandmother will be able to use it or somebody like a non-techy company is able to use it to get on board. And you know, not be fed up, why it’s taking longer, why back and forth, that is going to be a success. So again, just to reiterate, we have this help the little guy, all these small amounts people are buying and selling, I don’t have big corporations who are, you know, dealing with the bigger amounts. So everybody’s welcome if you have your company, need your crypto by cell, have some use cases, and just Welcome to get onboarded.
There’s one specific distinction, If you buy and sell yourself, you KYC yourself as an individual. But if you sell trades as a company, you just get on board, and as a company, you don’t deal like a personal account, you’re just dealing as a corporation.
Paxful’s Build with Bitcoin initiative
A few questions here, right, like about the specific donation we’ve done in India because India is one of the biggest markets. So we want to give back to the people in India and we by educating them, right, or if there’s some, you know, if there is a need, I don’t know, when there was a COVID, or some disaster, as well as come there to help. So, and again, it goes back to education because we feel like people are not, don’t have enough time to educate themselves, or they don’t have resources. And there are reasons like, for example, why didn’t I didn’t have time.
So with that, I’m going with our initiative built with Bitcoin, for example, where there’s no freshwater. In Africa, like the oldest son or daughter, we know that they have to spend six hours every day going to the city, picking fresh water and walking back. Now imagine how much time is lost. So instead, we built a fresh Well in that region.
A good example is Ronda, where there are about 450,000 people who actually now use that every day. So Wow, a lot of people have saved time, right? And what they can do with the time put into education. And that’s where our schools come in. Right? So we’ve built schools now it’s six already. So in Ronda, two in Kenya, and two in Nigeria, I was personally in Kenya two weeks ago. And again, the opportunities are massive there, right. It’s like, what I mean is, we can compare that to India as well as Africa, most countries, they escaped this online banking and went to mobile wallets.
Will Paxful’s marketplace integrate NFTs?
Technically, we are a marketplace, and we can list NFTs as well. And we’ve been thinking and looking at this, and this is a brand new customer base, like why not? I personally want to get all these kinds of things out all these new products, features, and whatever now is hot in the crypto space, because it’s just, you know, new user base, we showed them the usefulness of NFT, you know, then they get onboard into the crypto world.
In general, I think NFT is here to stay because it’s an art form that gives you basically proof that you own some art piece and then you know, later on, it can be redeemable into actual tickets and, you know, actual like real-life items and so on.
So I think it’s just the beginning. But again, at the same time, it feels to me this is like, all were like 2017 with this Ico and tokens where you could have tokenized things. But now, these tokens are wrapped like NFTs. So you technically could have done it. But again, I think it comes from the user’s perspective, what they see.
Paxful is a great platform that clears the vision about the crypto industry. The team behind the trading platform is actively willing to participate in the developments of the industry. They are educating them about crypto, like this whole financial literacy, and believe that crypto is here to stay.
To know more about the blockchain and cryptocurrencies ecosystem, do check out our podcasts streaming from all the popular apps. To learn more, you can check out our community page.
