Jack Dorsey's crypto company TBD has teamed up with Paxful co-founder Ray Youssef 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 networking 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 like Nigeria and Kenya, shut down due to regulatory pressures and internal disputes.
Civ Kit intends to create a network of decentralized, noncustodial bitcoin marketplaces, which could run into the thousands, Youssef said during a recent episode of The Scoop, a weekly interview podcast by crypto outlet The Block. .
He claimed that Civ Kit would lead to thousands of plug-and-play P2P marketplaces around the world, adding that decentralized identity technology developed by Jack Dorsey's company TBD would play an important role in the process.
Previously, Youssef 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 matters worse, in mid-January my co-founder decided to sue the company and myself. The litigation got really nasty and it scared away our best people. chief resigned, I had no operational staff.
Paxful shuts down due to internal disputes
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 it was suspending operations following internal disputes between Youssef and Paxful co-founder Artur Schaback.
Specifically, the latter accused Youssef of shutting him out of the operation, withholding key details about the platform's business transactions, and carrying out fraudulent fund transfers.
Paxful encouraged users to transfer their funds to non-custodial wallets or other platforms, such as the new Noones P2P bitcoin marketplace.
Noones offers similar functionality to Paxful, including wallet, referral service, marketplace and escrow, with Lightning Network functionality expected to be available in a few weeks.
Civ Kit, however, intends to go further than Noones and Paxful, allowing anyone to build a Bitcoin-based decentralized marketplace on top of their ecosystem, Youssef said.
"This is possibly the most exciting thing since Bitcoin. It will allow anyone - community or nation-state - to create their own decentralized market. My dream is that there are 1,000 options being traded. execution all over the world.