You heard of LocalBitcoins and LocalEthereum. What about LocalMonero?
LocalBitcoins is the peer-to-peer platform that allows you to sell and buy Bitcoins quickly and easily to and from any seller who has an account on the platform. You simply sign up for an account and start searching for deals and you can pay for or get paid for your Bitcoins in local currencies, global mobile money, or persistent payment methods such as PayPal, Skrill, Payoneer, MoneyGram, Venmo from PayPal, Payeer, TransferWise, and Western Union or if you want, bank account deposit or via cash in person.
But now if you want to buy Ethereum, you also do not necessarily need to buy Bitcoins then rush to an exchange that offers Bitcoin to Ethereum exchange. If you have some Ethereum sitting on a central exchange, that's a pretty nice route to directly exchange it into Bitcoins on that exchange without transferring them. What happens with the majority of centralized exchanges is that you might have some limitations: with some of them, you discover that you might not be able to transact cryptocurrency if you come from some (unsupported) countries.
On these centralized exchanges, you might also get limited to pay or get paid for cryptocurrency to only one or two payment methods and therefore, if you are holding fiat on an "unsupported" payment method, you will need to incur fees converting your funds to the "supported" payment method. You won't believe it that most of these exchanges will barely support methods such as PayPal, Skrill, e.t.c., ideally making it very difficult and unnecessarily difficult to buy and sell crypto. But they are fantastic for large trades, anyway.
For Ethereum lovers and fans, another good route is to run on LocalEthereum online service which works pretty the same as LocalBitcoins service: there are ideally all fiat and payment/deposit options you would be looking for in order to trade your cryptocurrency quickly and easily.
But now for Monero lovers, there is the LocalMonero service you can use in addition to the ordinary crypto exchanges you are aware of. It works just like LocalBitcoins -- sort of a single cryptocurrency marketplace where you can sign up for an account and trade crypto from and to whoever you wish. You get to choose the payment method, prices and fiat currency in which you want to trade crypto.
LocalMonero is Hong Kong-based and is not a new service as such: it was launched last year and allows you to trade Monero to other people from across the world in over 100 local fiat currencies and with ideally every major payment method. That means if one payment method does not work in your country, you still get to use a different one or a wire transfer or bank transfer. You can deposit money through these methods and buy Monero and you can also sell Monero and receive fiat in all these payment methods (actually more than 60). Creation of an account is quite easy, with no ID or personal details to do or the KYC (Know Your Customer) or AML (Anti-Money Laundering) standards to meet.
LocalMonero charges a 1% fee to a person who creates buy or sell advertisements for every completed trade, which is higher when compared to some exchanges, but there are no deposit or withdrawal fees. You can also send Monero from the account to other wallets outside of the LocalMonero but there is network transaction fee to incur, which is similar to most of the outbound transactions on many platforms.
If you are a seller or buyer, you can create an advertisement for your Monero up for sale or for the amount you want to buy, and then customers can browse through the trade ads and select which and from who they want to trade using the payment method and fiat currency they like. Both the seller and buyer get to specify the amount of Monero they want to buy or sell. You can also choose between the online or local face-to-face trades. If you choose the online over the face-to-face with the seller or buyer, the Monero is first deposited in escrow and the escrow releases it after confirming receipt of payment. For face-to-face trades, you arrange with the client where to meet and collect your cash.
A buyer gets to select the fiat currency in which they wish to pay Monero and the country, in order to access a list of advertisements from that country. You then select one ad from a trader and enter the amount you want to buy and then place the buy request. You send the payment and this locks the amount of Monero in escrow. The escrow service will release Monero when the seller confirms having received your payment, which happens by him/her clicking a button. A seller can also select from one of the buy advertisements and then have the buyer send payment to lock Monero in escrow until they confirm the recipient of the money.
The company can also mediate any disputes that arise in transactions. Otherwise, the transaction between LocalMonero accounts and wallets is instant while it takes 10-60 minutes when sending out from your LocalMonero Wallet.
If you are a customer looking for extra security for your account and funds, you can enable Two-factor authentication or even use I2P and Tor network accessibility if you want an extra layer of privacy. Nevertheless, like LocalEthereum or LocalBitcoins, it is most suitable for small trades.
