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Ray as
entrepreneur

Ray as Entrepreneur
50%
of his business profits are given back
50%
of his business profits are given back
Brand is the memory of feelings. Ray Youssef®

In a meeting one day, Ray told his product team that the work they were doing was not simply to create financial products that helped their customers. They were creating feelings – because feelings are what customers experience every time they use a product. Good products create good feelings for customers, and the memory of those feelings is how the brand is defined. “Brand is the memory of feelings,” he said, and it has been the foundation of his customer service philosophy ever since.

Economic empowerment

We have to work for the billions, not the billionaires. Ray Youssef®

Ray’s customer service philosophy is about putting people first. He has said that technology is “not worth a damn if it doesn’t help people,” and the same philosophy carries over to his economic worldview. Ray says, “We have to work for the billions, not the billionaires,” and that means empowering the people Ray calls “the little guys.”

The little guys are the people the global financial system does not serve. By extension, they are alienated from the world economy. Most of the people affected live in the Global South, but many do not. They are the unbanked and the underbanked, the people without the “correct” identification or bank credentials, and that means they can’t buy products, transfer money, make remittances, obtain loans, start businesses. The people in the Global South who manage to gain access to the financial system pay a hefty premium.

Ray as Entrepreneur

Projects

CivKit

In 2023, Ray co-created CivKit, an open source, p2p market system built on the Nostr protocol. It is positioned as a permissionless and censorship-resistant marketplace that allows anyone to build a reliable and trust-based trading environment.

CivKit

In 2023, Ray co-created CivKit, an open source, p2p market system built on the Nostr protocol. It is positioned as a permissionless and censorship-resistant marketplace that allows anyone to build a reliable and trust-based trading environment.

Ray says, “CivKit is a way for people to trade while putting their trust in a reputation system. People can build their own marketplaces and I know they want that kind of product. They want infrastructures free of the government. CivKit allows people, wherever they are in the world, to build a global marketplace that allows them to trade anything. And it’s free. CivKit is a key strategy to help people build a new financial architecture.”

NoOnes

Ray founded NoOnes in 2023. By then, he had realized it would be impossible to complete his mission to empower the Global South if he was based in the U.S. The regulatory environment made it impossible for him to serve his customers.

NoOnes

Ray founded NoOnes in 2023. By then, he had realized it would be impossible to complete his mission to empower the Global South if he was based in the U.S. The regulatory environment made it impossible for him to serve his customers. He relocated to the Global South and created NoOnes, the world’s first Global South based p2p crypto super app. In less than two years, it attracted over 2 million users.

Ray says, “Creating value is really the essence of what entrepreneurs and companies like NoOnes do, and the beautiful part is how our value creation model works. We want to create value in Nigeria for Nigerians, for Kenyans in Kenya, in El Salvador for El Salvadorians, and all over the Global South.”

Using the Noones app, young entrepreneurs create value when they start a business by piggy-backing off crypto and the NoOnes peer-to-peer marketplace. Many of the young entrepreneurs in the Global South are being held back by a lack of liquidity and their inability to access funds outside of their home markets – these are the roadblocks that make up the financial apartheid Ray talks about.

Ray says, “All those young entrepreneurs and traders are not being held back by their level of talent and innovation or their work ethic. The young people I’ve met in the Global South are some of the most tech-savvy, dynamic people on the planet. Once we show them how tobreak through the barriers that have been holding them back, they are going to bust right through and astonish the world.”

NoOnes currently operates in more than 60 countries around the world and offers over 500 payments methods.

Paxful

Ray co-founded U.S. based Paxful in 2015 after discovering a way to make money trading gift cards for crypto. He bootstrapped the company without the need for venture capital, and 5 million users were attracted to the platform by the end of 2020.

Paxful

Ray co-founded U.S. based Paxful in 2015 after discovering a way to make money trading gift cards for crypto. He bootstrapped the company without the need for venture capital, and 5 million users were attracted to the platform by the end of 2020. Ray has been credited with driving crypto adoption in the Africa, and he did it almost single-handedly. “I did it by talking to people in places like Africa, places where people are starved of opportunities or shut-out by the global financial system. And once those people realized what they could do using crypto and our peer-to-peer platform, our business exploded.

“It started with me taking calls from people all over the world who needed help. They were unbanked or underbanked, and the financial system wouldn’t allow them to do what people in the West take for granted.”

Some of the calls Ray took during this time were recorded for posterity and made into a video used as customer service training for Ray’s team. Watch the video here.

By 2022, Paxful had more than 10 million customers and it was included in Time’s Top 100 Most Influential Companies list. A year later, Ray resigned as CEO and returned all his shares due to problems with his co-founder and a regulatory environment in the U.S. that made it impossible for him to serve his Global South customers. Fulfill his mission to eliminate financial apartheid has always been Ray’s number on priority.

Project website

The Future Of Cryptocurrency

Crypto is driving the reinvention of global trade and finance. Ray Youssef®

Entrepreneurs in the Global South have been trapped in their own little markets, so even making payments or doing business with countries right next door is extremely difficult. It is basically impossible for the average African entrepreneur to scale their business by expanding outside the African continent. To be able to truly unlock the potential of the Global South to create value, entrepreneurs must be nurtured, and Ray’s belief is that the environment we create for them is the key. They need an infrastructure that allows them to flourish. Driving crypto adoption is a massive part of that strategy.