Paxful's P2P Platform Delists Eth

An update shared by Ray Youssef, Paxful's founder, reveals that the firm has officially delisted Ethereum from its P2P platform due to Ethereum's recent operational deviation from what he believes defines a solid blockchain.

Ray's tweet reads "We finally kicked #ethereum off our marketplace. 11.6m humans safer. Integrity over revenue. Who's next?"

While this decision will drain Paxful's revenue, considering the majority of Paxful's customer trades in ETH, the firm's CEO gave some reasons for removing Eth from its marketplace.

One of the main reasons was the transitioning of ETH from the proof of work (PoW) protocol to proof of stake (PoS), which he affirms makes ETH less decentralized. As extracted from his post, "Proof-of-work is the innovation that makes Bitcoin the only honest money there is, whereas proof-of-stake has rendered ETH essentially a digital form of fiat." Ray further argues that ETH's new adoption of the PoS protocol means only a small group of people (validators) control the chain, which means people might require permission to use Ethereum in the future.

The Ethereum network officially merged with Beacon on September 15, 2022, making it a proof-of-stake blockchain. Since then, block validation has replaced traditional mining in the Ethereum network, reducing Ethereum's gas fee and energy consumption altogether.

Paxful's third reason for delisting Ethereum is that "it's heavily tokenized," a situation it alleged has "robbed people of billions." Ethereum's tokenization strategy is almost as old as the blockchain itself. It started adopting tokenization at the advent of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in October 2015. The first recorded form of NFT based on the Ethereum blockchain is Etheria, launched during DEVCON 1 (the first developers' conference).

It looks like Ray's beef with Ethereum has existed since the establishment of Paxful. The blockchain's recent move to a PoS protocol only triggered Paxful to delist it from its P2P platform.

According to the CEO's post, "They have stolen valuable momentum away from Bitcoin and cost us years on our mission." The firm believes that delisting ETH safeguards people better, considering that many lose money tokenizing their Ethereum investment.