“We are hoping that by getting these licenses we can extend that umbrella to them,” Youssef said. The company, which has a mailing address in Wilmington, Delaware, facilitates about 60,000 trades a day, and it recently began performing ID verification on customers who reach $1,500 in trading volume or wallet activity -- an arbitrary number the company decided on internally, he said.
Peer-to-peer trading volumes are still a drop in the bucket compared to traditional crypto exchanges. And there is additional risk of manipulation on certain exchanges, run largely by software. Posters on Reddit, a forum favored by the crypto crowd, often complain that many have sent their Bitcoin to a wrong address, or a wrong amount to a person they dealt with -- and they have no way to get their money back. Bitcoin transactions are irreversible, and using peer-to-peer exchanges often means less hand-holding and support than on traditional crypto exchanges.
“It’s definitely more cumbersome to use a P2P exchange,” Carter said. “But if I live in Iran and have a great desire to buy Bitcoin, you may not have any other options. So people often use these peer-to-peer exchanges out of necessity.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.