We at Sociobits had the opportunity to have an insightful conversation with Roshan Dharia and tried to understand what Paxful’s story and mission are, what changes it is bringing in the world of crypto and what plans it holds for the future.
About The CEO of Paxful- Roshan Dharia
Roshan Dharia, CEO at Paxful, leads global operations and strategic evaluation. With 17 years of experience, he founded PTHL Affiliates, specializing in distressed company acquisition and turnaround. Formerly with TrustToken, he led DeFi institutional lending, deploying over $1.5 billion. Roshan drives profitable growth, having managed $30 billion in financial restructurings and M&A. He aims to enhance Paxful’s user experience for its 12 million users.
What is the story of Paxful’s?
Roshan Dharia- Started in 2015, Paxful is further along on its mission today than ever: global financial inclusion and individual empowerment. Growing rapidly from the US into the Global South – especially underbanked populations across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. At its core, Paxful is a borderless payments marketplace that allows anyone to move money anywhere, powered by a global community of cryptocurrency traders.
Today, Paxful is run by a veteran management team with deep dedication to excellence across product, safety, support and compliance. We’re actively helping over 12 million users across 130 countries access digital assets, send money globally, grow their business and much more. This allows the Global South to leapfrog local financial infrastructure and jump directly into better saving or earning opportunities, consume foreign goods and services, or swap out of a local currency.
How does Paxful differentiate from its competition?
Roshan Dharia- Paxful offers something special to 12 million registered users around the world: a way of sending money from anywhere, to anyone – often without the need for a bank account. This allows users in the Global South to be independent of the local financial infrastructure and immediately join the global economy.
As a peer-to-peer marketplace, Paxful acts as a borderless payments marketplace, allowing individuals and businesses to better send, save or earn money across hundreds of payment methods by transacting directly with one another to access digital or foreign currencies.
Paxful consolidates four key elements: a vast web of international payment providers, on-the-ground experts and community leaders, institutional-grade 3rd party escrow, and finally, professionally run compliance and support departments to simultaneously serve customer needs and operate securely.
By fostering a decentralized marketplace that offers greater flexibility, accessibility, and control over transactions, Paxful users are empowered to enter the global economy regardless of local constraints, especially in underbanked regions.
How does Paxful select and verify its users, especially considering the potential for fraudulent activities in peer-to-peer transactions?
Roshan Dharia- Paxful operates at extremely high standards of excellence for both global compliance and marketplace safety. Any marketplace is only as good as its buyers and sellers, which is why we emphasize trader quality above all in who we welcome to trade on Paxful. We do that by verifying the identity of every trader for eligibility, enforcing an expectation of safe and fair trading through both automated and staffed tools, and through multiple community-level programs on both a digital and in-person basis to cultivate a strong culture of peer-to-peer economies.
You can look at this process as welcoming new users into a valuable club: once it’s clear they are who they say they are, Paxful offers them a strong foundation of clear rules, in which a community of friendly global traders are moving and making money from anywhere, to anyone.
How does Paxful ensure the security of transactions and user funds on the platform?
Roshan Dharia- Paxful takes a multi-pronged approach to securing funds and transactions, emphasizing transparency, trade and user integrity, independent custody, and attentive support.
While peer-to-peer trading carries some inherent risks, one of the most important layers of security is making certain your counterparty is who they say they are. To that end, Paxful employs comprehensive global ID verification as part of onboarding, while also screening out sanctioned or suspicious signups.
To further protect our users and the integrity of trading on the marketplace, we allow buyers and sellers to come to their own trade terms, then assist a fair and fast transaction by providing cryptocurrency escrow through an independent institutional-grade custody partner. Whether during or after a trade, we also provide around-the-clock customer support and dispute resolution users have come to trust and rely on.
The data of every one of these touch points is fed into an underlying fraud prevention system composed of both people and software, proactively responding not just to individual scam attempts – but entire patterns of behavior at once. In the veteran hands of a blended technical and support team, many with plenty of their own P2P trading experience, our in-house and 3rd-party tools help make Paxful a reliable place to trade.
Besides what Paxful can do for its users, we educate our traders about how to trade both safely and effectively, with endless video, written, and social content through the ages not just on how to protect yourself on Paxful, but even profit.
What are some of the most popular payment methods used on Paxful, and how do you ensure a seamless trading experience for users using these methods?
Roshan Dharia- Of over 450 payment methods served, among the most popular are bank transfers, popular payment apps like PayPal or Skrill, and gift cards of all types. Peer-to-peer markets thrive in places where financial infrastructure is minimal or artificially controlled, individuals and businesses are underbanked, or where there’s unmet local demand to engage with the global economy – whether to access their currencies or for financial opportunity.
From sourcing deep and diverse payment option liquidity, to keeping user funds safe in institutional-grade escrow during transaction, to offering 24/7 global support (soon with live chat), we make sure every step of every trade is best in class.
How does Paxful plan to evolve and adapt to the changing landscape of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology?
Roshan Dharia- Without spoiling too much, we can say we’re looking both within and outside of the cryptocurrency industry for innovation. On that journey, we’ve really committed to the practice of building in the open, by sharing our recent and upcoming product efforts with our community in the form of user town halls.
This dialogue forms another core pillar of our plans: being guided by the needs of our users versus by industry trends. That’s what’s built our loyal and growing audience to date, we’ve continued to double down on our community, and all sides are being well rewarded for it in the form of an increasingly best-in-class marketplace.
What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs looking to start their own cryptocurrency or fintech businesses?
Roshan Dharia- From students paying their tuition to institutions moving millions of dollars of cryptocurrency between countries every month, Paxful is home to all kinds of users. It’s their advice I’d most eagerly refer you to, like Jay Villarante of Moneybees in the Philippines, and the owner of TradeX in South Asia!
