LocalMonero P2P Exchange Shuts Down After 7 Years
The privacy-focused cryptocurrency Monero's peer-to-peer (P2P) trading platform, LocalMonero, has made the decision to shut down its operations effectively immediately.
Hey everyone,
— LocalMonero (@LocalMoneroCo) May 7, 2024
After almost 7 years of operation, we have made the difficult decision to close our platform.
The winding-down process begins today, and finishes 6 months from now. Our support will be available for help throughout this period.
Read more:https://t.co/66gqe5HFpc
In a Tuesday announcement, LocalMonero, the largest, most trusted, and most established P2P Monero exchange within the XMR community, announced that after almost seven years of operation, due to a combination of internal and external factors, the firm has made the difficult decision to close its platform. The company did not provide specific reasons for why it is winding down its operations.
Furthermore, LocalMonero stated that the winding-down process begins on May 7 and finishes 6 months from now with all new sign-ups and advertisement postings disabled. On May 14, the platform will disable new trades. However, our support staff will be available for help from now until November 7th, 2024, when the website will be taken down.
The exchange informed its users to reclaim any funds from their arbitration bond wallet prior to the deadline date; otherwise, the funds may be considered abandoned or forfeited.
The LocalMonero statement continued, “For the majority of Monero's existence, LocalMonero has existed. Thankfully, the Monero ecosystem has grown significantly over the years, and we are confident that the protocol will continue to develop at a rapid pace, regardless of our platform, especially with the imminent launch of Haveno and other DEXs like Serai, atomic swaps, and FCMP (full blockchain anonymity set replacing rings of 16).”
Following Kraken's termination of support for Monero for its customers based in Ireland and Belgium in April and the recent legal action against Tornado Cash, crypto users and analysts have viewed the announcement by LocalMonero as yet another setback to privacy coins and protocols.
Global financial regulators have been focusing more of their attention on privacy coins and services in recent months. As the crackdown on privacy grew, other privacy services like Trezor Coinjoin and Wasabi Coinjoin also shut down recently.
LocalMonero was established in 2017 as the Monero equivalent of LocalBitcoins, and its closure today comes a year after the P2P Bitcoin trading service LocalBitcoins announced it was shutting down after a decade in operation.
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