Quote from: franky1 on Today at 06:11:43 PM

Quote from: Z-tight on Today at 05:25:26 PM

Quote from: Learn Bitcoin on Today at 04:02:56 PM

The trading volume in LocalBitcoins has been declining for a long time, and there is no significant market demand for their service. No company will run a business that is not profitable anymore. So, they had to take this decision.

Localbitcoins lost their trading volume because they used to be a p2p BTC exchange that later began to ask for KYC from their customers, their users were people who wanted to trade only p2p, so obviously trading volume was going to drop, as their customers moved to other BTC p2p exchanges.

whole saga explained in short
when P2P traders become popular. THEIR BANKS see people using personal accounts doing ALOT of wire transfers. much more than normal people do on personal accounts. this triggers banks to flag such accounts and investigate

in many cases those p2p traders had to upgrade to business accounts register as a payment facilitator/money service. which meant requirements of doing KYC

this eventually lead to localbitcoins needing to add this data collection feature

other events where scammers. who would buy bitcoin. and where the scammer would contact their own bank and claim that a hackers accessed their bank and sent some money to a thief. .. thus the scammer got the bitcoin and a fiat refund. and made the btc seller be flagged as a thief

this too caused sellers to want more info on the buyer to prove the buyer was the account holder

..
now here is the thing
DEX platforms are new. so they have yet to hit the scenarios localbitcoin sellers are hit with due to lack of popularity.. however when DEX seller get popular and start doing too many wire transfers or getting scammed and treated as thieves. they too will end up shutting up shop or going official.

thus DEX wont change things, its just the same saga in repeat. where DEX is just at the beginning and yet to hit the drama

I think there's more than that. Scammer issue is pretty much solvable, in the worst case they could have left just the cash option. KYC also doesn't seem to be the root of the issue - they could have just migrated to another country (somewhere offshore). I've heard rumors that they were having issues with authorities, perhaps they were forced to close? But then again: why didn't they sell the company or the domain? I guess there would be many people willing to take over.