Detroit-based Benzinga, a media and data provider bridging the gap between retail and institutional investors, sent its team to Miami, Florida April 6-9 for Bitcoin 2022.
During that time, Benzinga sought to recognize the innovation in digital assets, broadly, and spoke with founders, investors and beyond.
The following is a conversation with Ray Youssef, the CEO and founder of Paxful, a global, peer-to-peer platform building a financial system for the 100%, one Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) at a time. Check it out!
Q: Hi Ray, nice to meet you. Care to start off with an introduction?
Ray Youssef: I’m a startup and tech guy. I’ve had many startups – in the double-digits – and here I am in bitcoin.
I was born in Egypt and grew up in New York. I like building products for human beings and, actually, helping people. I have a crazy dream that everyone can be rich.
People don’t have to be poor for others to be wealthy; we can all have plenty.
I’m building a machine, a tool that humans can use to free themselves from economic apartheid and that is all built on bitcoin because I view bitcoin as the only honest money we really have.
Honest money will lead to peace.
How did you find bitcoin?
The first time I heard about it – 2011 – I dismissed it as nerd money. However, in 2013, I started to dig in and read the white paper.
I learned bitcoin could sustain itself and the incentivization model for miners impressed me.
This was a programmer and he designed a beautiful system, which is Layer Zero.
What humanity really needs is a civilization kit. You need to be able to take open-source code, fork it, and run your whole country. Most of the governance is about money.
Bitcoin is Layer Zero, Lightning is a layer on top of that for payments, and then you have other things like custody solutions, you can decentralize a company, and so on.
Tell me more about what Paxful …
