Bitcoin: The P2P exchange AgoraDesk is closing its doors

A major shock in the Bitcoin Peer-to-Peer community. AgoraDesk, one of the major players in the field and also the publisher of LocalMonero, has just announced that it is shutting down.

These are hard times for privacy advocates. Following the incidents with Tornado Cash, Samourai
and Wasabi, it is now AgoraDesk that has just announced its closure:

After nearly 7 years of operations, due to a combination of internal and external factors, we have made the difficult decision to close down our platform.

AgoraDesk is renowned for facilitating the purchase and sale of bitcoins without KYC, peer-to-peer. This is thanks to a matchmaking process between buyers and sellers and an escrow process that helps secure the transactions. AgoraDesk also manages the website LocalMonero, its counterpart dedicated to the cryptocurrency Monero, which is more infamous due to its completely anonymous transactions and is also affected by the closure announcement.

The statement does not specify the exact reasons for this decision. Nor whether it is related to the previous actions taken by authorities on Bitcoin anonymization solutions. It is hard not to see a connection. In any case, there will be much speculation.

However, this episode highlights the fact that any solution, if it’s centralized in any way, is vulnerable in the long term, despite all the precautions taken. Time will tell if competing platforms (HodlHodl, LocalCoinSwap, Peach, etc.) will suffer the same fate or not. In this context, opting for a 100% decentralized solution, such as BISQ, could prove to be an alternative.