Paxful Review: The Review You Need To Read

Paxful is one of the most popular cryptocurrency platforms in the crypto space. Having been founded back in 2015, it has been around for most of its history too. The platform is on a mission to open its doors to the new digital global economy to people worldwide.

What Is Paxful All About?

The company aims to achieve this by allowing users to buy, sell, and trade digital currencies. Unlike other platforms, Paxful is all about community, which uses a P2P model to facilitate trading. Despite this model, the platform still offers users a free crypto wallet, which is a bonus!

This approach has allowed the company to experience rapid growth over the past years. It now has offices in Estonia, the UK, the Philippines, Dubai, and St. Petersburg, and its headquarters in New York. These offices house some of the 400+ employees that serve over 6 million users.

The platform offers more than 300 payment methods, making it one of the most accessible crypto services. No matter where you live, chances are you will be able to find someone to trade crypto with.

The community-based platform, Paxful also gives back to the community. The company has an initiative named #BuildwithBitcoin, which makes the cryptocurrency a vehicle of change. The campaign has helped thousands in Africa by building schools, water facilities, and incubators.

As you will see in this Paxful review, their community ethos is reflected all across the platform. Let’s get started!

What Features Does Paxful Offer?

Paxful is more than just a P2P crypto marketplace. The platform offers several features that will allow you to interact with your crypto in several ways. Whether you are a small business owner, a veteran trader, or just starting your crypto journey, Paxful has something to offer.

Cryptocurrency Wallet

As we mentioned earlier in this Paxful review, this platform offers a free cryptocurrency wallet. While on the website, the Paxful wallet will tell you it is a Bitcoin wallet. This feature will allow you to store any of the cryptocurrencies supported by the platform.

This is because, technically, you won’t be offered a multicurrency wallet but will have different wallets. While this might sound confusing, it is the same service every wallet provides: you get separate addresses for other coins.

Paxful wallet is pretty limited in functionality as it will only allow you to send, store, and receive cryptocurrency. However, this is everything most Paxful users will need from the wallet to use the platform.

Buy And Sell Cryptocurrency

The main feature of the platform is its buy and sell cryptocurrency service.

By using it, you will connect with other users interested in selling or buying their crypto. Just choose a currency, your preferred payment method, chat with the other user, and complete the trade! Of course, you should have created an account first, which you can do here.

To ensure the security of your funds, Paxful acts as an escrow service. This means that the platform will hold the cryptocurrency until both parties agree on its completion. If a dispute arises, the Paxful team will mediate to ensure the best resolution is reached.

Paxful Pay

This feature is intended to be used by business owners. No matter the size of your business, whether you have a team of 50 or you are a freelancer; you can take advantage of it.

By using Paxful pay, you will be able to receive payments from over 6 million users worldwide with fees as low as 1%. The platform also ensures you won’t have to worry about chargebacks or complex tracking.

The service is straightforward to integrate into your website, making it a breeze to start using the service. The best part is that the minimum trade amount is 10 dollars!

Paxful Bitcoin Kiosk

This feature will allow you to sell any of the supported cryptocurrencies to third parties. You can use this if you have a blog, website, YouTube channel, or another virtual platform.

The feature works by providing you with an embedded widget that will allow your visitors to buy cryptocurrency. In return for helping your followers buy crypto, you can earn a 2% commission if you choose to. It is a win-win!

Paxful Trader Program

This program will allow you to earn additional perks and benefits as you reach higher levels. This can be done by meeting specific requirements which include:

• Having an account for a specific time.
• Verifying your identity.
• Having a good behavior score.
• Having completed a certain number of trades over the past 90 days.

You can earn reputation, priority support, customized fees, instant disputes, a dedicated account manager, and more if you fulfill these requirements.

How Secure is Paxful?

Let’s start by clarifying something important: Paxful itself has not been hacked in the past. While you might find news about having been the victim of a data leak in early 2021, this was not the case. While the details on more than 4 million users and employee information were leaked, this data was not obtained from Paxful servers.

Paxful confirmed after completing an investigation that the platform had not been breached. However, they said the data might have been obtained illegally from third-party suppliers. This distinction is crucial as it is possible that the information was scraped from other sources, which has been the case for platforms like Linkedin.

Now, the information that was compromised during this alleged breach was that… Information. Don’t get us wrong, and we are aware of how crucial private information is. However, it would have been much worse if cryptocurrency would have been lost, which is another element that suggests the platform itself was not hacked.

Now that we have discussed this incident, which we could not overlook in a Paxful review, let’s get back to business. Despite this, Paxful continues to be considered a safe platform for crypto users to use. This is because of the security features and measures it has in place to ensure the safety of your crypto.

Backend Security Features

As with every other crypto platform, there are some features that users are not aware of. These features protect the platform itself, ensuring data can’t be extracted or cryptocurrencies stolen from their vaults.

Let’s start by talking about Paxful’s wallet. This service is provided by BitGo, one of the most secure services in the crypto space.

The company has been around since 2013 and has always been at the forefront when it comes to ensuring the safety of crypto assets. BitGo also helps Paxful to remain compliant with all security requirements a financial platform of its size needs to follow.

Paxful makes use of high-security encryption both for data storage and transmission. This means that even if a hacker was to gain access to Paxful’s databases, they wouldn’t be able to read the data. The same is true for anyone who tries to steal your data while it travels to and from the server.

Additional Security Features

In addition to this, Paxful has a bug bounty program in place. This program ensures that if a person were to find a bug or vulnerability, it would be more profitable for them to report it. The result is that the person receives a reward and the platform gets to fix the bug. As we said before, this Paxful review would show you how community-centered the platform is.

In addition to this, Paxful also allows its users to activate additional security features. This includes setting up Two Factor Authentication (2fa) by using Google Authenticator, Authy, and SMS-based two-factor authentication.

You will also be able to set up security questions that will further increase your account’s security. This will ensure that if you ever lose access to your account, you will regain access. Think of it as the equivalent of seed phrases in crypto wallets.

How Good Is Paxful Customer Support?

Personally, we haven’t had the need to contact Paxful customer support. While we did it for the purpose of this review, we found that the documentation is excellent. If you have read some of our other reviews, you know we are fans of self-service options.

After all, nobody likes to wait for someone else to fix a problem you can fix faster by yourself.

Well, in this regard, we found that Paxful did its homework. Its help center has a lot of valuable resources that are not limited to the platform. For example, we were glad to find a glossary that includes advanced and not-so-advanced crypto concepts. In addition to this, you can find all the information you need regarding the platform.

If this is not enough to get your doubts or issues solved, you will have a chatbot that will provide further assistance. While we would have liked to bypass the chatbot, we found that contacting customer support was easy enough by answering some questions.

Once you have chosen to contact customer support, you will have to wait for the team to get in contact with you. This will usually happen in a matter of hours, which is highly efficient for the crypto space.

Paxful’s team is highly knowledgeable and professional! If customer support is essential for you, there is nothing to worry about with Paxful.

Does Paxful Charge Fees?

The short answer is yes. As with all cryptocurrency trading services, you will incur fees when using Paxful. That being said, these fees are extremely competitive and only apply to sellers. This means when buying crypto using Paxful, you won’t need to think about fees.

Now, if you are a seller, it is a different story. The fees you will need to consider when selling crypto with Paxful are:

• Bank Transfer: 0.50%
• Credit/Debit Card: 1%
• Digital Currency: 1%
• Online Wallet: 1%
• Cash: 1%
• Goods & Services: 1%
• Gift Card: 5% for iTunes and Google Play cards and 3% for all other gift card types

Paxful charges these fees for its escrow service. This means that if the trade is not completed, Paxful doesn’t receive the fee. Fair is fair!

Now, when sending and receiving crypto from Paxful’s wallet, you will have to consider fees. As with every wallet, you will have to pay for network fees. When sending one of the supported currencies, the fee will depend on the type of wallet and currency. Let’s take a look at how it works:

• Bitcoin (BTC):
  • External Wallet:                     
    • If your transaction is lower than $10, you will pay 0.00008 BTC in fees.     
    • If it is between $10 and $20, it will be 0.00016 BTC.                             
    • If it is higher than $20 you will pay 0.0004 BTC.
  • Internal Wallet: Up to $1000 for free per month and $1 or 1% after that, whichever is greater.
• Tether (USDT):
  • External Wallet:
    • If your transaction is lower than $10, you will pay 1 USDT in fees.            
    • If it is between $10 and $20, it will be 2 USDT.
    • If it is higher than $20 you will pay 5 USDT.
  • Internal Wallet: Up to $1000 for free per month and $1 or 1% after that, whichever is greater.
• Ethereum (ETH):
  • External Wallet:                     
    • If your transaction is lower than $10, you will pay 0.0005 ETH in fees.
    • If it is between $10 and $20, it will be 0.001 ETH.
    • Finally, if it is higher than $20 you will pay0.002 ETH.
  • Internal Wallet: Up to $1000 for free per month and $1 or 1% after that, whichever is greater.

When receiving crypto in your wallet, you won’t be charged anything but the network fees! That’s unless the origin wallet manages not to charge them somehow!

Is Paxful Right For You?

If you have been paying attention during this Paxful review, you will see that Paxful’s popularity is warranted. The platform is extremely convenient and easy to use while also offering extremely low fees! With support for more than 300 payment methods, there is no excuse not to buy crypto now.

That being said, as the platform only supports Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Tether, its cryptocurrency support is extremely limited. We would like to see the platform offer additional currencies. However, this tends to be the case with P2P platforms.

We also believe that Paxful offers top-notch security, independently of the alleged data breach. The features it offers and its history in the space are more than enough to support this belief.

Personally, we are big fans of Paxful and understand why so many people agree. We actually use it ourselves! You just can’t beat the convenience a P2P platform offers when combined with a good escrow service.

If you are considering giving Paxful a try, which we recommend, you can check it out here. However, if you remain unconvinced, we also have reviewed other crypto trading platforms you can consider using. By doing so, you might find a platform that better suits your needs or just find out that Paxful is the best choice for you!