This will be the first of hopefully many deep dives I do with consumer facing dApps that I find interesting and I think you should invest in. I love products, I love startups and I love helping folks out, trying to combine all three here with my deep dives, I also won’t be using AI in writing here lol, something doesn’t sit right with using AI to write my own blogs.

My first deep dive is on p2p.me

p2p.me is a decentralized onramp offramp based out of India currently participating in the Alliance DAO cohort. They've done almost $1M in transactions within 1 year while maintaing user privacy, the first of its kind.

For anyone wanting to get onramp their fiat to crypto, and maintain privacy at the same time, the only solution for them is p2p.me.

Folks currently use Binance P2P as their main onramp/offramp method and this doxxes them to the governments and puts their bank accounts at risk. In India 100s of bank accounts got frozen due to Binance P2P, where a transfer is linked with a scammer’s wallet/bank account. This needs to be decentralized and people should have the choice of privacy. You can't have your bank accounts frozen simply because you engage in new technology.

This is where P2P.me comes in, you can buy crypto by placing an order, and anyone else can accept that order and sell their crypto in return, anonymously, without KYC. Fiat transfers happen directly bank to bank, with crypto transfers working the same way, removing the middle man here to avoid getting doxxed. Tracing wallets back to their banks becomes almost close to impossible, your bank accounts are kept more safe.

In addition, with increasing doubts also on how supportive governments will be on crypto, and whether or not there will be regulation or straight up bans, it becomes crucial to have alternate paths to onboard the masses without being permissioned by the governments of the world through centralized methods.

Onramp/Offramps in crypto are where the masses get onboarded onto the web3. There are 100s of onramps/offramps but lets focus more on the p2p market of onramps/offramps .

Binance p2p is the biggest onramp/offramp via p2p exchanges on the planet.

Just in the 2022-2023 financial year alone, Binance P2P processed $7B worldwide, across 3.8M individual orders (source). This show's the massive size of the market and it will only keep growing as more folks get onboarded.

Now seeing the size, if the same people were given the guarantee of the same experience, with privacy preserved, there is a clear GTM strategy here. p2p.me has a huge market here to attack into, where even capturing 1% of the market can become a huge success overall for the platform. Plus, there are a lot more unregulated markets than regulated ones for crypto, which would make a platform like p2p.me a preferred choice over any other one in those specific markets, India being one of the largest ones.

Binance P2P

• As already mentioned, Binance P2P does over $7B in one year alone in volume, over 3.8M transactions

Transak

• Transak in 2022 alone did more than $420M in transactions

Moonpay

• In 2024, Moonpay did over $2B in transaction volume

There are 100s of onramps/offramps, and its clear that there are billions of dollars at play here, and not a single one of them is an actual privacy preserving decentralized solution. This is a huge market to tap into, and we're barely getting stared with onboarding the masses.

Using the app was super simple and straightforward. I logged in with my wallet, but you can login with socials too and you get an embedded wallet. To actually use the app you need 50 Reputation Points (RP) and a recommendation from an existing user of the app.

P2P.me heavily relies on User based invitation to the platform to maintain reputation and avoid scammers/frauds to be get instant access to the platform. Therefore the only way to actually start using the app is to get recommended by a user.

Steps to get recommended (refer to Fig: Home page -1):

1. Share Your app wallet to the user who will recommend

2. The user will enter the wallet address on the input field under recommend each other on home page

3. User will be prompted to sign a message on their connected wallet to prove it's them recommending the new wallet address. (note: each user is limited to 4 recommendations to begin with)

Once this is done, the recommended user instantly gets 200 RP.

RPs are the main way the platform reduces risk of fraud and limits access to scammers. Therefore, RPs are a core part of every activity on the app, from recommending someone, to buying/selling, to acting malicious and more. To start with, how can a user earn RP in the app?

To earn RPs you can:

• Get recommended by a current user of P2P2.me

• Verify on Aadhar (Indian National Identity number)

• Transact on the app (buy/sell USDC), 5 transactions result in 75 RP

The Value of RP:

• You need 50 RP and a recommendation to start with to use the app

• Your total RPs represent your total value of a transaction possible at a time: 2RP = 1 USD

  • Someone with 200 RP (like me) can at most buy/sell 100 USDC at a time

RP Slashing

• Your RPs get slashed if you go through a buy process, don't make a payment but claim you do

• Your RPs get slashed if a user you recommended is known to do fraud, not complete payments or gets their bank accounts frozen

Using this RP economics model on the app, the platform is able to limit access to only those trusted by those within the network itself. In addition once a malicious actor is caught, the folks who recommended them can also be identified and have their RPs slashed to maintain the trust and integrity of the system.

1. You can input how much USDC you want to buy, my limit here is 100 USDC since I only have 200 RP

2. You pay the merchant/seller directly in fiat, I paid this through Google Pay in India.

3. You wait for the transaction to be approved and get the USDC sent to your wallet, settlement time is 2-10 minutes.

The platform offers users a choice of doing zkkyc, where using Anon Aadhar a user can reveal partial information from their national identity card, like just their name, DoB and their Aadhar number, without having to submit a copy of their Aadhar card to the app directly.

Why have this?

It helps the platform become semi-compliant by incentivizing KYC. This option allows both sides of the market, the ones who value privacy and don't to utilise a single platform.

• It was not clear to me that by getting recommended I can instantly start trading. Solutions:

  • Post getting a recommendation a popup can be shown saying 'Congrats you can buy/sell USDC now

  • Add Getting recommended as a task under the profile, because I only saw Aadhar, it solidified my view that I need to do KYC (zkkyc in this case using Anon Aadhar) to be able to use the platform

• Recommendation process is tedious. Too many steps especially for when the app's usage is dependent on network effects. My solutions:

  • Allow referral links to be shared, where instantly if logged in via a referral link I get my RP

  • Allow inputting Referral codes from the end user, instead of needing the user to go back to the recommender

• Raising Errors: In my first attempt of buying, the merchant's Bank ID was not working/it was frozen, so I could not complete the transaction/cancel it or inform the protocol that this merchant's account is not working

  • Allow a cancel transaction reason with choices on why the user wanted to cancel. This allows a much faster feedback loop.

1. Risk of fraud, malicious actors on both sides of the ramp.

2. Criminals using it to escape government scrutiny / Compliance with Government

With a decentralized version of this, there is a high risk of fraud. It becomes very difficult to identify who the malicious actor is in fiat p2p payments because banks don’t give access to APIs and screenshots are very easily spoofed. So no matter who raises a dispute, it becomes very difficult to identify who is at fault here.

This is where Reclaim steps in, where in the case of a dispute, the buyer/seller can prove that they made or reveal they didn’t make a transaction by logging into their bank account and porting their transactions out using zktls tech (Reclaim Protocol). This automates dispute resolution and identifies malicious actors quickly.

To raise a dispute post the transaction, a user can click raise dispute under their activity tab, and follow the steps as recommended by the platform. The user will be asked to prove through Reclaim to login to their bank account, and Reclaim will capture their transaction associated with the merchant's account, and if it's not there or the amount is insufficient, the user is deemed malicious, but if it is there, then the merchant is demmed as malicious.

Since Scammers can easily get access to a KYC-less and permissionless platform, there is a good risk that the platform can be used for criminal purposes. To tackle this

• RP system is robust, so only trusted networks get recommended and transaction limits are set to 2RP=1 USDC limit

  • This reduces risk of scammer usage as those with large amounts of USDC will not be able to offramp, and even if they do it will be a tedious and slow process.

• They enabled Aadhar verification to increase RPs

  • Those who prove their Aadhar details will be prone to legal action if found for illegal activities. But only through Aadhar verification can you increase your transaction limits easily, once again making it harded for criminals to use.

  • This also helps P2P.me remain somewhere in the border of compliance if legal action is taken against the protocol as power users mostly have done the KYC if they want.

I'd love explain why I think the perfect team is building this, but also seems like doxxing ain't a good option for this so I'll keep this for my next dive.

Overall I am super bullish on decentralized p2p exchanges and I love the product the P2P.me has built, I see so much potential in it, especially when they go Global (currently they are limited to India). With their entrance also to the Alliance DAO cohort (my fav crypto accelerator) I see them growing big very quickly. They've already done almost $1M in Volume even with low transaction limits, it speaks volumes to their distribution.

Can't wait to see how far this product grows, this one is truly built for the masses.