Lea Petrášová

Lea Petrášová is the co-founder and CEO of Vexl, a mobile app for peer-to-peer Bitcoin trading without KYC. An active member of the cypherpunk community, she is passionate about privacy and security in the digital world and about making Bitcoin accessible and peer-to-peer as it was originally intended.

Vexl was built with people from SatoshiLabs, the company behind the Trezor hardware wallet, and works from the phone book rather than from an exchange: it shows offers from your own contacts and from theirs, so a trade happens between people with some social distance rather than none, and without an account, an identity check or a fee. The project runs as a non-profit.

The design is an argument. If bitcoin can only be obtained through registered exchanges then every holder is on a list, and the peer-to-peer property in the original design becomes theoretical. Vexl tries to make the original way of getting bitcoin, from another person, convenient enough that ordinary users choose it.

She spent more than a decade in software development before this, and speaks at Bitcoin conferences in Europe, among them BTC Prague, on privacy and peer-to-peer trade.