Paxful, a Bitcoin marketplace, is now offering peer to peer trading in gold, according to a company release. In a blog post, the company said the new service was due to customer demand.
The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has heightened interest in gold – a traditional safe haven in times of uncertainty. Now Paxful customers can trade in gold. Paxful believes this will further bind traditional and digital finance.
Paxful reports that it currently grants more than 300 different types of payment methods for the purchase of Bitcoin including online wallets, bank transfer, mobile recharge, cash in-person and dozens of other unique methods of payments. According to the website, Paxful claims over 800,000 customers and more than 800,000 Bitcoin transacted.
Ray Youssef, CEO and co-founder of Paxful, said they assessed the demand for buying and selling gold for Bitcoin and found interest quite high:
“Vendors on the platform expressed a great interest in the addition of gold as a payment method. Gold has been used as a store of value for millenniums and its importance to the economy has rarely dwindled. We believe by adding a gold payment option to the platform we can continue to drive our mission of financial inclusion in places such as Africa, where high gold concentrations will grant them access to bitcoins they may have not have been able to purchase otherwise.”
Gold buying and selling on Paxful is just like selecting and other payment method on the platform. Anyone who has gold can buy BTC from a vendor who accepts this payment method and vice versa.
In compliance with Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and KYC laws, Paxful requires full identity and address verification once a user has reached an overall gold transaction volume of USD $50 or more. Paxful said that “ongoing enhanced due diligence may be conducted on users who want to sell gold.” Bitcoin remains in the Paxful escrow during the trade, and the physical delivery of gold must be completed within 21 days of completion of the transaction.