❓ Before you trade

Paxful and LocalBitcoins are gone: where do you buy bitcoin from a person with escrow now?

What those platforms actually gave you, and how to find it again: escrow locked before you pay, any local payment method, person to person.

LocalBitcoins closed in 2023 and Paxful has been through shutdowns and restrictions since. What people miss is not the brand. It is the combination: a seller's bitcoin locked in escrow before you pay, any payment method of your country, and a deal between two people rather than against an order book. That combination still exists; it is just spread across different kinds of platforms now.

The kinds of platforms, honestly

Exchange P2P desks
Binance, Bybit, OKX, Bitget P2P. Big liquidity, many rails, escrow inside the exchange. You need an exchange account and KYC, and you trade against their listings.
Non-custodial P2P
Bisq, Hodl Hodl, RoboSats. Escrow by multisig or bonds, no KYC, more technical. Disputes are handled by the protocol’s own mediators and the trade sizes tend to be smaller.
Custodial escrow with an arbiter
iEscrow. The platform holds the crypto until the terms are met; a human arbiter decides disputes with the reason in writing; identity verification, and both sides must submit their ID document in a dispute; local bank transfer per country, PIX, cash; private trades by username; six languages.

What to check before you pick one

  • Is the seller’s crypto locked before you see the payment details? If not, it is not escrow.
  • Who decides a dispute, and do you get the reason? A protocol mediator, the platform, or nobody.
  • Which payment methods are excluded? A platform that lets sellers accept PayPal is exposing them to chargebacks.
  • Can you trade with a specific person you already found (a friend of a friend, a Telegram contact) or only against public listings?
  • How do you verify the domain? Fake copies of every escrow site exist. iEscrow’s real accounts are listed in Official channels.
iEscrow is a young platform and says so. What it does not do: pretend to have LocalBitcoins’ volume. What it does: the same locked-before-you-pay deal, with any local method, between two people, with someone neutral deciding if it goes wrong.
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