If you're reading this, there's a decent chance one of your go-to platforms for trading crypto peer-to-peer just isn't there anymore. LocalBitcoins shut down in 2023. LocalCryptos shut down in 2022. Paxful — one of the largest P2P Bitcoin marketplaces in the world — shut down in November 2025. That's three major platforms gone in three years, and a lot of people are now searching for "what do I use instead."
We're not going to pretend VaultPay is a one-to-one replacement, because it isn't. But it's worth being precise about what those platforms actually did, what problem they solved, and where VaultPay overlaps with that — and where it doesn't.
What Paxful, LocalBitcoins, and LocalCryptos actually did
All three were, at their core, fiat-to-crypto exchanges with an escrow layer bolted on. Someone wanted to turn cash, a bank transfer, or a gift card into Bitcoin (or vice versa), and the platform matched them with a counterparty, held the Bitcoin in escrow, and released it once the fiat side of the deal was confirmed. The escrow existed to make a stranger-to-stranger fiat trade survivable — without it, one side has to trust the other to pay first.
That's a specific, valuable function: on-ramping and off-ramping between fiat and crypto without a centralized exchange account.
What VaultPay does instead
VaultPay is not a fiat on/off-ramp. It doesn't touch bank transfers, cash, gift cards, or any payment rail outside of crypto itself. What it does is different: it's non-custodial escrow for buying and selling goods and services where the payment is already in crypto — ETH or USDC on Base. A seller lists an item, a buyer funds an escrow smart contract for the agreed amount, the seller delivers, the buyer confirms, and the contract releases the funds. If something goes wrong, either party can open a dispute and a small panel of registered community reviewers votes on how the funds should be split.
The overlap with Paxful et al. is the shape of the trust problem — two people who don't know each other, transacting without a company standing behind either side of the deal. The difference is what's being exchanged: they solved fiat↔crypto conversion; VaultPay solves "I'm sending crypto for a real-world item or service and want a neutral third party holding the funds until delivery is confirmed."
If what you actually need is to convert cash into crypto, VaultPay won't help you — that's a different product, and we'd rather say so than let you assume otherwise.
The part that is genuinely comparable: not trusting a company with your money
The reason "non-custodial" matters here is the same reason it mattered on those platforms. VaultPay's escrow is a smart contract deployed on-chain — it has no admin key, no pause function, and no upgrade mechanism. Nobody at VaultPay can freeze a deal, redirect funds, or quietly change the rules after the fact, because there's no code path that lets anyone do that, including us. Funds move by the contract's own logic or they don't move at all. You can read that logic yourself — the contract is source-verified on Basescan.
That's the property that made Bisq and Hodl Hodl (two platforms still standing) worth using even after the KYC-heavy, custodial competitors ran into regulatory trouble: the platform never had custody in the first place, so there was nothing to seize or freeze.
Where VaultPay is honestly behind, today
We'd rather say this plainly than have you find out later: VaultPay is currently live on Base Sepolia — a testnet — with test funds only. There is no mainnet deployment yet, and no real-money transactions happen on it today. This is a beta, and we're treating it as one rather than dressing it up as something it isn't.
If you're looking for a working fiat-to-crypto P2P trade right now, your options in that specific category have narrowed considerably — Bisq and Hodl Hodl are the closest surviving analogs, both non-custodial, both without a company that can be leaned on to freeze your funds. If what you're actually after is a trustworthy way to buy or sell something with crypto you already have, and you're comfortable being an early tester, that's exactly what VaultPay is for.
VaultPay is a non-custodial escrow protocol currently live on Base Sepolia (testnet). See how the escrow contract works or browse the marketplace.