Paydece and Cueva: Rise and Fall of Spanish-Speaking Decentralized P2P

For a few years, if you wanted to buy or sell USDT peer-to-peer in Spanish and without leaving your funds on an exchange, the name that came up was Paydece. It was born in Argentina, grew thanks to users in Spain and Latin America, relaunched as Cueva in 2025, and its P2P marketplace disappeared in early 2026. This is its story, told with the sources that document it, and what it leaves for anyone who wants to pick up the baton.

The origins: from CriptoCars to Paydece

Paydece was founded by Carlos Diehl (CEO) and Felipe Ballester Molina, who met while studying Agronomy at the University of Buenos Aires. Before that, they had built CriptoCars, a project for selling cars with crypto, according to the accelerator Emprelatam.

Their first public steps date back to 2022. In July of that year they announced decentralized payment links with MetaMask on BNB Smart Chain and, in October, were already operating on Ethereum, BNB Chain, Rootstock, and Polygon. Sources do not agree on the exact founding year: between 2021 and 2023, depending on who you ask.

How it worked

The proposal was a non-custodial P2P with onchain escrow:

1. The seller locked their USDT or USDC in a smart contract.
2. The buyer paid in local currency.
3. Once the payment was confirmed, the contract released the crypto.

In its own messages, Paydece summed this up as “no KYC, no custody”. Its documentation explained that the contracts prevented either the company or any third party from moving funds without the user’s approval, except when a dispute was opened. The escrow was audited by Hacken, and the Cueva version had another audit from the same firm in July 2025.

The fee was 0.5% per trade in 2023, with a subscription plan that eliminated it. In 2025, its CEO spoke of 0.3%.

Growth: Spain as the main market

The figures the company published show steady growth:

Date	Milestone	Source
January 2023	First $1 million in volume	@Paydece
May 2023	Tim Draper joins as an investor	@Paydece
July 2023	1,000 users and 3,000 transactions	@Paydece
November 2024	Monthly record of $2.06 million	@Paydece
January 2025	Cash Points in Spain with BitBase	@Paydece
April 2025	More than $25 million accumulated across more than 35,000 transactions	@charlopaydece

The most striking part is where that volume came from. In August 2025, Diehl told iProUP that users in Spain “make up 90 percent of the volume”. An Argentine project had become one of the main decentralized P2P options for the Spanish public.

February 2025: the domain hijacking

On February 28, 2025, Paydece suffered its most serious documented incident. According to its CEO on X, attackers got into its GoDaddy account, the domain provider, and pointed the DNS to another website that drained funds from anyone who connected their wallet. They also gained control of the company’s email and its X account.

Two points stand out:

• It was not a flaw in the smart contracts. The escrow kept working. The attack, which the team itself attributed to social engineering against GoDaddy’s support, managed to disable its second authentication factor.
• The risk was in the website, not the blockchain. A user who went to the usual address ended up on a malicious clone.

The team recovered the domain within a few days, set up a form for affected users, and committed to “take responsibility if any user was affected” and to switch providers. We have not found public data on the amount stolen or on refunds.

From Paydece to Cueva

On August 17, 2025, the company presented Cueva: “We are the same team and the same technology,” they said, with an experience that was “simpler, faster, and safer,” which included trading USDT and USDC without paying gas. The next day they announced a $2.2 million seed round led by Tim Draper, and in its first month as Cueva it moved $2.7 million.

But the rebranding also brought a strategic shift. According to Emprelatam, Diehl explained that Cueva’s vision was “migrating from B2C to B2B”: from a marketplace between individuals to payment infrastructure for businesses.

The end of the P2P marketplace

What happened next is less well documented, so it is worth separating what is confirmed from what is not.

Confirmed:

• In early January 2026, Cueva announced that it was operational again with additional security measures, which indicates a prior service interruption. The next day, it announced that KYC was now mandatory to trade on its marketplace, with the argument of eliminating scams.
• Today, the former Cueva app is no longer available. The domain cueva.xyz hosts a personal portfolio of projects, and paydece.io offers international payments for businesses connected to their ERP.
• Paydece’s own account refers to Cueva in the past tense, as “a very important stage” in which more than 10,000 people joined.

Unconfirmed:

• Some users attribute the shutdown to a hack in December 2025. We have not found any official statement, post-mortem, or press coverage confirming it, nor any data on its scope.
• There is also no official announcement of the date the marketplace closed.

Whatever the exact cause, the result for users was the same: the leading decentralized P2P platform in Spanish first required identification and then stopped existing.

What the Paydece story teaches us

The Paydece story offers several lessons for any P2P user, and for any platform that wants to take its place:

1. The demand exists. Tens of thousands of trades showed that there are users in Spain and Latin America who want to buy and sell stablecoins without handing their funds to an exchange.
2. Onchain escrow protects the funds, but not the website. The 2025 attack did not touch the contracts: it deceived users with a hijacked domain. Always entering from a bookmark and reading what you sign is as important as the contract audit.
3. No custody and no KYC is a fragile model if it depends on a single company. When the company changes direction, the service disappears. That is why it matters that funds never sit in its hands: even if the platform closes, your crypto stays in your wallet.

Vailox: picking up non-custodial P2P in Spanish

Vailox was created to fill the gap Cueva leaves, with the same principle that made Paydece grow: your funds never pass through the platform.

• Onchain escrow in a smart contract whose owner cannot withdraw locked funds: in a dispute, it can only release them to the buyer or the seller. We explain this in what is crypto escrow.
• No registration or KYC. You connect your wallet and trade.
• USDT and USDC on six networks: Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base, BNB Chain, and Tron.
• Local payment methods, such as Bizum, SEPA, Revolut, Wise, PayPal, Zelle, MercadoPago, or Pago Móvil, plus in-person cash through Cash Points.
• Contract re-audited by HelixNebula, starting from open source code that had already been audited.

If you were a Paydece or Cueva user, you can start with our guide to buying USDT with Bizum or see how Vailox works.

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This article is based on official posts from Paydece and its CEO on X, the project’s technical documentation, Hacken’s public audits, and coverage from iProUP and Emprelatam. If you have verifiable information about Cueva’s shutdown, write to us on X and we will update the article.