The popular peer to peer trading marketplace Paxful has recently hit an all time high in terms of weekly traded volume. As of December 2, data from CoinDance shows that the week of November 23 was when the P2P trading market Paxful saw close to $30 million in Bitcoin trades in an upward trend which is an all time high since the platform’s inception.
For those of you who are not reading the Bitcoin news now, Paxful is a P2P over-the-counter (OTC) platform which connects users who want to buy and sell Bitcoin using gift cards, PayPal, domestic bank transfers and other payment methods.
The P2P trading market Paxful is also a decentralized and non-custodial service. As such, it sees how the Bitcoin trades denominated in 70 different national fiat currencies, seeing around $20 to $25 million in trades (weekly) throughout most of the year.
While the trading marketplace reported a consistent uptrend since 2015, the data from LocalBitcoins – which is a veteran name in the P2P trading space – has also been rising and its peak volumes were largely reported during the winter in 2017. Over the past two years (2018 and 2019), the volume by LocalBitcoins remained in the $40 to $60 million (weekly) range for most of the time – even though the last few months have seen a downturn with sub-$40 million levels in the months of October and November.
One of the P2P trading market Paxful’s niche markets is the exchange of retail branded gift cards for Bitcoin. In fact, the platform’s site has revealed that Amazon gift cards are among the most popular products in the market, followed by eBay, Steam and iTunes gift cards.
While Paxful is a direct competitor to LocalBitcoins, it has to work a lot harder to surpass this giant. Still, the market share in this industry is continuously challenged by new firms – a while ago, LocalCryptos (formerly LocalEthereum) was in the cryptonews for announcing that it was set to add Bitcoin support alongside Ethereum (ETH).
In addition to this, in July 2019 we saw reports showing that the major centralized American cryptocurrency wallet and exchange Coinbase recently entered the cryptocurrency gift card market and started allowing customers in some countries to exchange coins for e-certificates.
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