Paxful announces new interim CEO

Peer-to-peer (P2P) trading platform Paxful has appointed a new interim CEO to lead the company three weeks after resuming its marketplace.

In a Medium blog post, Paxful announced the appointment of Roshan Dharia as the company’s new interim CEO. Dharia, whose appointment immediately took effect, has been tasked with “strengthening operations and exploring strategic alternatives.”

Following the announcement, Paxful users on Twitter asked the new CEO to unfreeze customer funds. Paxful recently resumed its marketplace after suspending operations in April 2023.

The suspension happened amid a challenging regulatory environment, the departure of some executives, and the legal tussle between former CEO Ray Youssef and co-founder and chief operating officer Artur Schaback.

Before joining Paxful, Dharia was a senior executive at TrustToken, which rebranded as Archblock in September 2022 and is behind the fifth largest stablecoin by market capitalization, TrueUSD (TUSD). While at Archblock, Dharia was in charge of the company’s decentralized finance (DeFi) institutional lending outfit, which has deployed nearly $2 billion worth of stablecoin loans to crypto companies.

“It’s a great honor to become CEO of Paxful. Over the last eight years, Paxful has been a pioneer in establishing the real use cases of bitcoin and helping millions of people in the process. I look forward to hitting the ground running and building on the innovative technology developed by the Paxful team.”

Paxful interim CEO, Roshan Dharia

Meanwhile, commenting on the appointment of the new interim CEO, Ray Youssef said that he was not part of the process and “will never have any part in it.” The former chief also hinted at the launch of a new token.