P2P cryptocurrency pioneer Paxful announced the surprising results of their recent foray into AI on Twitter. Founded in 2015 and now the longest-running and largest peer-to-peer marketplace in crypto, Paxful is looking to “bring P2P into the future” in several ways as part of an overhaul a year in the making. The most standout feature? The cryptocurrency company’s adoption of AI is not just a buzzword but a way to streamline the sometimes complicated, other times risky world of peer-to-peer trading.
Under prior leadership, Paxful won a TIME100 Most Influential Company award in 2022 for its efforts in getting the Global South into Bitcoin. Since then, the company has been under a new management team led by long-time operator and Web3 executive Roshan Dharia. It appears to be cutting its own path to influence by adopting cutting-edge LLM and AI agent technologies in ways not commonly seen among other cryptocurrency companies.
Paxful now boasts some 14 million users making direct deals on their own terms to swap the likes of bank wires for Bitcoin transfers. The company comes to the AI era with almost 10 years of peer-to-peer data covering everything from support encounters to “known scam patterns,” according to a company statement. Through a mix of strategies – training LLMs on marketplace data, reinforcement learning with the support team, and more – users continue to enjoy the human touch through features like live chat support while enjoying the ever-vigilant support of AI on safety, security, and fraud prevention.
On what drove Paxful’s revamp, Paxful CEO Mr. Dharia defers to his users and thanks his team, writing, “…we listened, built, and optimized everything about P2P, inside and out. The result is a brand new Paxful, with the best-designed app in peer-to-peer, loyal to its founding mission: building a financial system for the 100%.”
Steak or sizzle? Digging into Paxful’s use of AI in crypto
Challenged to substantiate the impact of AI on their P2P marketplace, Paxful cites some impressive facts about its efforts and methods—especially in terms of AI agent accuracy. By training internal models on nearly a decade of training data and further improving accuracy with guidance from Paxful’s best support agents, the company is claiming AI agent accuracy as high as +90% in areas like scam prevention and identity validation. But what does that really mean for an end user?
Paxful called out three significant upsides of the new AI push.
Firstly, support on Paxful has gotten dramatically faster, as fast as 2.3 times quicker than other P2P competitors based on public data, claims the peer-to-peer giant.
Next, Paxful users on Telegram are commenting that the P2P marketplace appears much better moderated, with a major crackdown on suspicious offers now paying off.
Last, Paxful promises not to lose the human touch while experimenting with AI. Many like the new changes, pointing to the newly launched Live Chat, which lets users chat with a person in under a minute during service hours.
The present and future of peer-to-peer crypto
Paxful is delivering its AI update alongside a makeover of a different kind: The company rebranded its logo and aesthetic and launched a modern new P2P app for Android and iOS. Compared to a few other dedicated peer-to-peer crypto offerings on mobile, Paxful’s new app looks to be the one to beat in P2P, especially for crypto traders in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Over a year into new management, the reinvented Paxful also takes compliance very seriously, publicly emphasizing efforts in identity, fraud detection, and scam prevention. The compliance-first approach is a departure from some other decentralized or peer-to-peer access options popular with crypto traders in countries with poor banking infrastructure.
If the next step for P2P looks like the integration of AI, what comes after? In the Economic Times, Paxful CEO Mr. Dharia sees a world where P2P ecosystems are part of nearly every large, centralized Web3 company like Binance and Coinbase, mainly to access the more than 3 billion underbanked people across the Global South.
