Paxful
| Industry | Peer-to-peer bitcoin marketplace |
| Founded | 2015 |
| Defunct | Wind-down announced for 1 November 2025 |
| Website | Archived closure announcement |
Paxful was a peer-to-peer marketplace for buying and selling bitcoin and other balances. The company described itself as a people-powered marketplace that had connected users since 2015. It published a decision to wind the business down.
The announcement is cited from a Wayback capture dated 28 February 2026. The captured page has no visible publish date and opens with the words "today announces". Dates below come from the text of that page and from the Wayback timestamp of the capture.
Wind-down
On the announcement page, Paxful says it decided to wind down all operations by 1 November 2025. The same page tells users to withdraw balances as soon as possible, and says the company remains committed to the return of user funds and to open communication through the wind-down.
According to the closure post, the choice is not insolvency and not a problem with the leadership then in place. The page says the company had seen strong growth and remained financially stable, and that the decision was a view of long-term sustainability. It describes two years of compliance work, a balance-sheet restructuring, and a renewal of the executive team and the teams in other countries, under what it calls new ownership.[1]
A banner on that same capture, taken on 28 February 2026, already read that Paxful had shut down and that funds should be withdrawn. That banner is later than the 1 November 2025 date in the announcement.
Former co-founders
The announcement attributes the wind-down, in part, to what it calls historic misconduct by former co-founders Ray Youssef and Artur Schaback prior to 2023, together with the cost of compliance remediation. The page also says the company condemns those past actions as inconsistent with its later standards.[1]
The same captured page lists two further Paxful posts by title only. One is titled as a resolution of a Department of Justice investigation into historic conduct. The other is titled as a formal conclusion of Department of Justice and FinCEN matters.
Marketplace
According to the about text on the announcement page, Paxful had connected more than 14 million users across more than 140 countries, and people had used it to move, earn, save and store money since the founding in 2015. It names more than 400 payment methods for buying and selling bitcoin, USDT and other digital and local currencies.[1]
The product was a meeting place between buyers and sellers. Payment followed the method the two sides had available, and the company presented the site as the venue between them.