NoOnes: how ex-Paxful chief Ray Youssef’s P2P project works

In October ForkLog held an AMA session with NoOnes CEO Ray Youssef. The new project from the former Paxful chief targets the Global South and offers a P2P platform, instant conversion of digital assets, gift-card sales and a wallet with Lightning Network support.

This article explains NoOnes and tests crypto exchange on the platform.

Who is Ray Youssef

Ray Youssef is the co-founder and former chief executive of Paxful, one of the largest P2P platforms. On his page on X he describes himself as a pan-Africanist and a “pro-human monotheist”.

Youssef was born in Egypt and moved to the United States with his family at the age of three. He studied history at Baruch College. In 1999 he became interested in computers and started working at the telecom firm YadaYada as a senior software engineer.

In 2001 Youssef founded MatrixM, a company that made ringtones. From 2005 to 2015 he led a series of unsuccessful startups.

Youssef learned about bitcoin in 2011, but at the time decided to return to Egypt to support the revolution that had begun there.

“He joined the protests in downtown Cairo, nearly died on the first night of fighting and was arrested by the military as a possible CIA agent,” — says Youssef’s biography on Cointelegraph.

Back in the United States, Youssef attended a bitcoin conference where he met Estonian-born Artur Schaback. In 2015 he launched Paxful with him, which became one of the most popular places to buy and sell bitcoin.

In 2023 the co-founders diverged on the future of the market and Paxful’s operations, leading to a temporary shutdown of the platform in May. The venue soon resumed operations, and Youssef shared plans to launch its “censorship-resistant and globally accessible” clone.

However, at the end of the year he joined the P2P platform NoOnes as chief executive.

“I have been talking about Africa and the Global South for the past 10 years. And then it struck me: if I am really building something for the Global South, why not do it there? In a company of people from the Global South that works for people of the Global South,” — said Youssef.

What is NoOnes

NoOnes is a pixelated, retro-styled crypto super-app focused on buying and selling bitcoin. It consists of three sections: Trade, Gift cards and Wallet.

The Trade section offers the following options:

1. P2P Market. A marketplace for buying and selling bitcoin, Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC) for fiat with zero fees. It supports 536 payment methods, including bank cards, payment systems such as PayPal, and cash.
2. Convert. Fast crypto swaps at the market rate — bitcoin, Ethereum (ETH), Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC).
3. Spot. A venue for spot trading of 25+ altcoins, including Ethereum (ETH), Aptos (APT), BNB, NEAR and PEPE.
4. Silent Pool. Over-the-counter sale of altcoins using the internal NoOnes wallet or any external wallet. The service intermediates the deal and charges a 1% fee.

In the Gift cards section, users sell gift cards for 157 services for cryptocurrency, including Steam, PlayStation, Apple Store, Netflix and NoOnes. The latter can be created and redeemed in the corresponding section.

The custodial NoOnes wallet allows users to receive and send bitcoin (on the main network and the Lightning Network L2), Ethereum, Solana, as well as the stablecoins USDC (Ethereum, Solana) and USDT (Tron, BNB Chain, Ethereum, The Open Network and Solana).

Wallet supports direct purchase of USDT using Visa/Mastercard, Google Pay, Revolut Pay and SEPA. In this case the service fee is 4–8% depending on the chosen fiat currency and payment system.

In 2022 Ray Youssef recommended not using custodial wallets for long-term storage of assets.

“Why? For too long people have entrusted others with the safekeeping of money, but, as we saw with banks in 2008 and recently with FTX, you become dependent on these custodians and their morality,” — he said.

Youssef also promised to remind his clients weekly not to keep savings on any exchange.

According to the “CEO Dashboard” on the NoOnes website, at the time of publication the number of customers had exceeded 1.8m. The service is most popular in Nigeria, Ghana and China.

Testing NoOnes

To register on NoOnes you only need an email and a password. Identity verification is required in two cases: when conducting transactions from $10,000 and when trading/transaction volumes exceed $50,000.

“Unlike other exchanges, NoOnes does not require verification for all users. This condition is only for clients with large turnover,” — the trading platform’s team emphasises.

For watching Ray Youssef’s welcome video, NoOnes credits 500 satoshis ($0.35) to a special affiliate account. You can withdraw from it after rewards reach $5.

The optional KYC procedure is performed by Sumsub. For verification it is sufficient to photograph a passport or driver’s licence and then pass a quick liveness check. To exchange cryptocurrencies, you will also have to confirm your address.

Address verification is less common on centralised exchanges, so it may seem a complicated procedure. NoOnes’ guidelines state that to confirm it you need to provide an official document in Latin or Cyrillic (PDF or scanned) indicating full name and address, issued no more than three months ago.

In practice it is simpler. The list of suitable documents includes a bank statement that almost any banking app can generate. We created a PDF statement for the past three days and uploaded it to NoOnes. The platform reviewed the document in three minutes.

After verification we tested the wallet: we generated a USDT deposit address and MEMO on the TON network and sent funds to it.

After receiving USDT we converted them into bitcoin at the market rate on the Convert page.

We then tested sending via the Lightning Network: we went to the Lightning section of the NoOnes wallet and pasted an invoice generated in Wallet of Satoshi.

The funds arrived in one minute. The fee was just 111 satoshis ($0.08).

Conclusions

NoOnes is a trading platform “with bitcoin at its heart”, aimed at residents of the Global South. It does not promote dubious memecoins or a native token, pays rewards in satoshis and supports the Lightning Network — something far from all exchanges can boast in 2024.

Almost everyone will find on NoOnes a suitable way to buy bitcoin/USDT or to convert altcoins quickly. Some users may be interested in the ability to sell gift cards for cryptocurrency.