The CEO and co-founder of Paxful, Ray Youssef, previously confirmed plans to remove Ethereum from the platform and stated that “integrity trumps all.”
The remark was made in response to Jeremy Garcia’s criticism of Ethereum as “poorly designed” and incompatible with the “1st principles” of cryptocurrency. Garcia is the CEO of the Bitcoin education website Satoshi’s Journal.
Garcia went on to criticize the project’s complexity, claiming that because of it and the potential for fundamental change that it brings, “ETH will fail.”
Ray Youssef finally takes down Ethereum from Paxful
In one of his recent tweets, Youssef stated that they finally kicked ethereum off of their marketplace. “11.6m humans safer. Integrity over revenue 🤝🏽 Who is next?”
He stated that as of December 22, (UTC 12:00), ETH will not be available on Paxful. Youssef also highlighted some of the reasons why he removed ETH from Paxful. He stated that ETH recently transitioned from proof of work to proof of stake. The transition, according to him has rendered ETH essentially a digital form of Fiat.
Youssef went on to say that ETH is also not decentralized and it is controlled by a small group of people He also stated that one day users will need permission to use ethereum. Heading to one of the other reasons, he also stated that ETH had some real utility cases such as credit and lending. Youssef also mentioned that these real use cases have thrived only because of tokenization.
Speaking of the unforeseen events that happened in the cryptocurrency realm recently he also mentioned that it is their responsibility to protect the users. He also assured all the users that as a CEO he’ll always put purpose before profit.
Youssef made the observation that Paxful’s business model is vastly different from FTX during the Africa Bitcoin Conference, which took place between December 5 and 7. According to Youssef, the platform currently supports trading in Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDC, and USDT with “no hanky panky.”
Youssef responded that Paxful’s ETH volume is “quite small,” but that it was initially added in response to user demand. However, the company now has “a bigger responsibility” to drop ETH in light of recent events.