Interview: NoOnes visionary mission for Bitcoin adoption and empowerment in the Global South

Since its founding two years ago, NoOnes, a peer-to-peer (P2P) platform, has achieved a lot in a short space of time. As a visionary entrepreneur, Ray Youssef, NoOnes CEO, is helping lead the way in the evolving world of crypto. Using Bitcoin as a tool, Youssef and his team believe it’ll bring empowerment to the Global South.

In this exclusive interview, Rebecca Campbell, crypto content editor at CoinJournal, spoke with Ray Youssef, co-founder and CEO at NoOnes, to discuss NoOnes vision and how it and Bitcoin are empowering the Global South. Youssef dives into the challenges they face, a financial apartheid in Africa, political pressures from the West, the limitless opportunities for the Global South, and how the relationship between crypto and people is evolving.

Rebecca Campbell (RC): Can you tell me about NoOnes and where the name came from?

Ray Youssef (RY): NoOnes is a super app for the Global South. We started as a peer-to-peer crypto marketplace, but we always planned on being much more than that. In less than two years we’ve added a spot exchange and a virtual VISA card, and we’re about to launch our NoOnes gift card. We’re also a messenger app and you can even top-up your mobile phone. NoOnes is built for the people of the Global South, so we don’t have the problems of a US-based business trying to serve people in the Global South.

The way NoOnes got its name is a funny story. When NoOnes was just a dream, a series of brainstorming sessions with the guys who helped get it started, I’d been having these random thoughts about our family dog who had died about 15 years before. Her name was Heidie, but my mother gave her a nickname – Noons.

I loved that dog and for some reason, she was constantly in my thoughts around that time, so one day as a joke I said, “We should call the company Noons.” I wrote it down on a piece of paper and saw that it read like NoOnes, and I thought it was perfect. It captures the truth about what we wanted to do with a decentralized marketplace. Your money is NoOnes business. Your data is NoOnes business. Your business is NoOnes business.

RC: What are your vision and goals with NoOnes?

RY: Ever since I realized the power of crypto and peer-to-peer, my vision and goals haven’t changed. There are a lot of people in crypto who want to get rich, but that’s never really motivated me. I saw crypto as a leveler, an equalizer. And I saw how it could make a difference to people constantly left behind by the financial system because their money is the wrong color or their passport is the wrong type.

As soon as I saw the potential of crypto and peer-to-peer working together to create this eco-system that enables any form of money to become another form of money, I knew it was a mechanism that could end financial apartheid. I call it financial apartheid because that’s what the international financial system is – it discriminates against people because of who they are and where they come from. I’ve known that for a long time. With NoOnes, we can change that because we are based in the Global South and tailor our products to suit the people who need them most.

My vision is to see hundreds of cities like Dubai all over the Global South, with people trading freely, building wealth and making their lives and their family’s lives better.

RC: Can you talk about the role NoOnes and Bitcoin will play in empowering the Global South?

RY: First of all, we are based here. That means we have boots on the ground and can talk to the people who use our marketplace to buy crypto, trade gift cards, make payments, remittances, whatever. Our products are not based on a Western model and then forced on people because they have no other option.

Take KYC, for example. When I was in the US, we often had to file a suspicious activity report and lock a Global South customer’s funds when, for whatever reason, they were flagged on the system. Then we had to wait until the American regulators got back to us to say, “Ok, you can let these guys go.” Sometimes, we had to wait years until we could release a customer’s funds.

Meanwhile, these people, who did nothing wrong, had to wait until the regulator said they could access their own money. In the meantime, they had to find money from somewhere else to cover what the regulators locked away. Even the banks can’t do that, but Uncle Sam can. It was crazy. Why should we put our customers through that kind of pain?

The US still controls Africa to such an extent that it’s difficult for countries to trade with each other. That’s part of the financial apartheid I talk about. Look what happened recently with Binance. A new CEO comes in and the first thing they do is disable Pan-African trade on Binance peer-to-peer. Kenyans can only trade with Kenyans and Ghanaians can only trade with Ghanaians.

That’s the exact policy the US has been using to keep Africa and the rest of the Global South poor. We are changing that. I spend a lot of my time advocating for Pan-African trade. It’s a crucial part of making the Global South wealthy. Imagine if some guy running a business in New York couldn’t trade with a business in New Jersey. Would any American put up with that? Why should Africans?

RC: What are the challenges and opportunities you face in achieving this for Bitcoin to reach its full potential in the Global South?

RY: There are lots of challenges facing us, but the biggest one is dealing with the political pressure from the West. Anyone who goes against the West and their central bankers is going to be resisted. The governments and elites who run the global financial system are strong because they have a series of sliders, a bunch of levers they can push and pull to control everything.

They can pull one way and say, “Oh, Nigeria, you haven’t been listening to us, so we’re going to take your slider all the way down to zero.” They can move these levers at any time, so they have tremendous power, and they can control the economies of the world. They can punish or reward a marketplace, even whole economies, and we need to offset this.

Crypto and peer-to-peer are the offsets, and that’s why the West has such a problem with crypto. It’s why they put people who don’t follow their model in jail.

The opportunities in the Global South are unlimited. Africa has the fastest-growing population of any continent. It has 1.5 billion people, and the next 25 years will add almost another billion. There is a youth unemployment problem right now, but I see that as an opportunity. I’ve met so many young Africans who are savvy and dynamic and they all want to succeed. I’ve seen many of them use our marketplace to make money, to start businesses, and to change their lives.

India also has amazing opportunities, as does Latin America. There are so many opportunities in all of these places for people to create businesses by piggybacking on our platform – that’s one of the greatest successes of NoOnes, I think. We can’t have success unless we help others have success, and the ethics of that is mostly missing in the corporate world today.

Which companies are giving back 50% of their profits to the people who use their products? We are doing that at NoOnes. We have bonuses, incentives, and a Partner Program that rewards the people who help us grow because we want people to help us spread the word about the power of crypto and peer-to-peer. We need the Global South to know that it doesn’t have to settle for a Western model that doesn’t suit its needs.

If we add up all of those things – dynamic, savvy young people who are hardworking and ready to grasp opportunities, a universal container for money that is also a store of wealth, and the NoOnes marketplace that gives the Global South access to finance and free trade – we will reach the full potential of the Global South, and I think it can happen quickly. Most people in the West will be astonished by it.

RC: How is NoOnes different from what you did at Paxful?

RY: Paxful had a major disadvantage – it was based in the US. I’ve already talked about KYC and all the problems we encountered trying to help people in the Global South as a US company. You can’t do it – and it’s getting worse. Look at what happened to Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, [the former CEO of Binance]. He went to jail. Look at what happened to Pavel Durov, the Telegram CEO – he went to jail the minute his plane landed in France.

I had the same vision at Paxful that I have now, and maybe it took me too long to realize that I couldn’t achieve my mission of running a US company. But now the shackles are off. Nothing is holding us back now that we are based in the Global South.

I learned years ago that my priority has to be to serve my users, my customers. They can fire the CEO. I learned that helping my parents run a newsstand on Columbus Circle in New York City when I was a kid.

In the US, the first priority for most companies is to serve the government, then, if they’re happy, you can help your customers. That’s not right. And I won’t do that. We saw what happened with Binance. They gave up their user data to the [Israeli Defense Forces] IDF and hundreds of people lost millions of dollars – and some of them were killed. Compare the NoOnes privacy policy to the Binance privacy policy. We won’t give up our user data. I couldn’t say that when I was CEO of Paxful.

RC: How do you see NoOnes evolving in the next 5-10 years?

RY: NoOnes is going to get bigger, that’s for sure. Sometimes I have to remind myself that we didn’t exist two years ago because we’ve come so far in such a short time, but this is only the start. People might think of us as a crypto peer-to-peer marketplace, but we are always adding new products, making existing ones better, and we listen to our users so we can give them what they need.

I talk about our business as an ecosystem because that’s the best way to describe how we are evolving. We created a marketplace for crypto and gift cards, we added a spot exchange and other products, and we feed profits back into that ecosystem. People are building their businesses on top of our platform.

Expats working overseas send money home and realize our platform is a better, faster, and cheaper way of doing it than using a traditional money changer – so they start doing it for their friends and create a side hustle. Someone needs to make a payment in another country, but they don’t have a bank account, so they use our platform – they see how simple it is, so they start a business doing the same for other people. And it all feeds back into the ecosystem.

Imagine all these businesses taking the place of the traditional banks and money changers – the wealth stays in the Global South instead of lining the pockets of all the executives working for banks and financial institutions in the West. That’s part of the reason they don’t like what we do.

Imagine when all the people in the Global South realize how easy it is to make these changes. How easy it is to stop the drain on the resources of the Global South – it’s been happening for centuries and it has to stop, and it will. In five years, maybe less, NoOnes will be leading that drive and the Global South will be on the way to becoming a superpower.

RC: How do you see the relationship between crypto and the wider population evolving?

RY: That’s a great question because it’s the front line in the battle going on at the moment. Before I understood crypto I thought it was just “Internet funny money.” Most people still think that way now because they don’t understand it. I’m not sure governments understand it that well, but they know it’s a threat to the status quo. That’s why they tried to stop it, and that’s why they are trying to control it now.

The real power in the world is the one that controls the money system. The people in power have levers they use to keep us in our place, and the manner in which we reverse engineer it must be explained very clearly and logically for people if we are to succeed in getting them to help us fix the current state of humanity.

In simple terms, I’m talking about a currency war, and when I say currency I mean anything that is a store of value and can be traded. Eventually, the people will be won over to crypto because its power cannot be denied – even governments recognize this now. Some countries banned it, then they realized its utility, and now they’re trying to regulate it. Crypto isn’t going away.

The real question is whether the essence of it gets destroyed in the process of being accepted by the wider population. Crypto was designed to be trustless and permissionless – that means we don’t have to trust some government or corporation to have faith in its value.

RC: What is NoOnes focusing on at the moment?

RY: Our focus is on our three core values – everyone eats, bullish education, and revolutionary transparency.

I’ve already talked about giving back 50% of our profits and our partner program, and that’s part of what we mean by “everyone eats.” I don’t want to get rich at the expense of the people who use our products. Some people laugh at me when I say I am on a mission, but I’ve been saying it for more than a decade because it’s true. We won’t be happy if we are successful and others around us are not, so that’s why everyone eats is important.

Another principle is revolutionary transparency. Lots of businesses talk about being transparent, but most of them don’t follow through. This is why we get problems like we saw with FTX. NoOnes is different. Anyone who wants to see the business data I see about NoOnes can see it by looking at the CEO Dashboard on our app.

Right now, our biggest focus is on education. I’ve talked about the opportunities in the Global South, but those opportunities won’t mean anything if people don’t know about them and become educated about how crypto can help them solve problems. We created the NoOnes Academy so people can learn not only how to trade profitably, but also how they can do it safely.

Some people might want to make a payment or send money home, but they are scared of crypto because they’ve heard nasty stories in the media. We want to educate them so they understand how easy it works and how much utility it has. Some people might just use it in a small way – helping them pay for something because they don’t have a VISA card or a bank account. Others might be skilled and savvy, but they’re unemployed and they’re looking to earn money to pay the bills or to start a business – they might learn how to trade gift cards or crypto through the NoOnes Academy.

If enough people become educated about how our super app works, the Global South will change dramatically.

RC: What are your plans for NoOnes in terms of growth and development?

RY: I’ve already talked about Dubai, but it’s a great example of the future of the Global South. A lot of people think Dubai has had massive growth because of oil, but that’s just not true. Sheikh Mohammed made trade easy and the environment business-friendly, and pretty soon the money flowed into Dubai like a river. The money that came in was then fed back into development and we can see the result today.

My vision is to see cities like Dubai across the Global South, with NoOnes leading the way. We will provide the infrastructure, the education and the opportunities, and that means being on the ground, listening to people so we can give them what they need to help them grow. We’ve done it with our peer-to-peer marketplace, our spot exchange, a virtual VISA card, and gift cards – and new products are coming.

We’re looking at a peer-review credit score so users will get a rating that can be used to provide financing for start-ups and business owners. We want to fine-tune our messaging function because that’s a great way to attract people we can educate on the benefits of crypto.

We need more people to help us grow, so we’ll be hiring people on the ground wherever we do business. Already our users are helping us by making content to help educate their fellow citizens. Our growth and development always revolve around work. Free trade allows the money to flow and that puts people to work so they can create their wealth. I truly believe in universal wealth, but that only happens when the roadblocks to growth are removed. To do that we must have the people behind us, and that’s why education is so important.

Our goal was for NoOnes to have a billion users within seven years, and if we do that we will bring the Global South closer to the wealth it’s been denied for so long.