Paxful – Is It Good?

Paxful is a decentralized peer-to-peer exchange platform with over 300 payment options. Founded in 2015, it created a marketplace where people could interact after posting trade offers. Paxful quickly became a popular option for anyone looking to trade bitcoin with its multitude of payment options, its intuitive design and the chance it offers for anonymity. However lately there have been complaints about scammers and lack of security on the website.

Is Paxful a good option for bitcoin? How safe and reliable is it?

One of the main reasons to use Paxful is definitely their variety of payment options. With over 300 payment options, they have virtually every imaginable option you could need. It allows payments with, among others, cash deposits, credit and debit cards, multiple gift cards, PayPal, MoneyGram, Western Union and National Bank Transfer. You can also meet people in person if you want to exchange cash for bitcoins. The platform allows you to choose the highest rated and most reliable local users who you can trade with.

What Does Paxful give you?

Paxful offers a free wallet for you to store and transfer funds on the site. They protect transactions with an escrow service and 2 factor authentication. Paxful’s servers are also maintained in accordance with the highest banking specifications.

Paxful also offers an incredibly comprehensive customer support. Their team is quick to respond and you can contact them by email, social media, direct message, even phone! You can also verify your phone to receive critical alerts via SMS.

But what if you want anonymity? Well, while users are free to register and trade anonymously, however they’ll have limited purchasing options and you won’t be able to use any credit or debit cards. Nonetheless, orders in Paxful are processed quickly. You can pay in cash to deposit bitcoin to your account. All you need is send the receipt of your payment to receive your bitcoins to your wallet.

However it’s the anonymity and multitude of payments what makes it attractive to scammers, and Paxful still has a long way to go to properly address this issue. Keep in mind that, where there are P2P exchanges, there will always be scammers. There are scammers on eBay and Amazon. The best way to avoid them here is the same way you avoid them there: by looking at their reputation, their history and their offers.

Supported Countries

You can use Paxful all over the world except the usual suspects and one particular US state.

Countries not supported:

Burundi, Central African Republic Sanctions, Cuba, Crimea region, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, South Sudan-related Sanctions, Sudan and Darfur, Syria, Yemen.

In USA:

Banned in the state of New York.

Paxful Cons

• Scammers: Paxful has its fair share of people looking to scam users out of their money. The platform is yet to implement tougher security against them.
• Lack of community awareness: A P2P exchange is only as useful as the amount of people buying and selling. Since LCS is young, more community penetration is needed.
• Mixed reviews: Their reviews aren’t always great, however most of the bad reviews boil down not to issues directly tied to the website but to the scammers that pray on users.

Is Paxful Good For Bitcoin?

Paxful is very convenient if you’re looking for lots of purchasing options and an active community. However by trying to offer anonymous options and lots of payment options, it becomes attractive to scammer networks. Although scammers may be hard to spot, there are a lot of reviews that commend Paxful’s customer support because they were able to solve a scam in favor of the victim.

As long as you’re a savvy user and are as careful with your money here as you are everywhere else, you’ll find in Paxful an easy and intuitive way to trade your fiat money for crypto and vice versa.