🎙️ My guest today is Lea Petrasova, co-founder and CEO of Vexl, a peer-to-peer bitcoin app that lets people exchange bitcoin privately, without identification (KYC) or any middlemen. Lea is a prominent voice in the European cypherpunk community, dedicated to privacy, digital freedom, and restoring bitcoin’s original peer-to-peer design. We discuss why identity-linked bitcoin undermines true self-custody, how tightening cash controls and app-store censorship accelerate financial surveillance, and why Vexl chose to remain open-source and non-profit. Lea explains Vexl’s reputation-based trust model, the real risks of “dirty fiat,” and the growing global push toward CBDCs and digital IDs. We also explore how Vexl is evolving into a local marketplace for everything from food to services to hardware, showing how private, person-to-person exchange can quietly rebuild resilient, grassroots economies.
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We talked about:
00:00 — Coming Up…
01:23 — Introduction to Lea
05:58 — Leah’s Journey: From Academia to Bitcoin
09:08 — The Birth of Vexl
12:33 — Ad Break: Trezor & Abundant Mines
15:28 — The Problem Vexl is Solving - Purchasing Bitcoin As Intended
23:08 — Vexl Locality & Reputation’s Model
31:56 — Ensuring User Safety & Bad Actor
33:48 — The 1984 Apple Campaign Hypocrisy on Privacy
37:08 — Launching The Freedom Store
40:08 — Privacy In Today’s Surveillance Reality
43:58 - Privacy in Bitcoin
47:00 - Balancing Trust & Usability in Privacy Tools
54:00 — Sustaining Open Source Projects, via Grants
55:20 — What Keeps Lea Motivated?
My takeaways from this interview:
Lea’s path began far outside the tech world—moving from biology and Scandinavian studies into retail, then software—until discovering Bitcoin and its connection to identity, autonomy, and the politics of self-sovereignty.
Her early involvement in blockchain development exposed her to the noise of the ICO era, which pushed her toward Bitcoin maximalism and a deeper interest in privacy and the risks of identity-linked financial systems.
Vexl was born when long-time Bitcoin developer and cypherpunk Slash approached her during what was meant to be a sabbatical. She immediately recognized the need for a safe, reputation-based alternative to LocalBitcoins, which had just shut down, leaving users with no private on-ramp.
She eventually realized she was working with industry legends—Slash and Stick—whose technical architecture and cypherpunk ethos shaped Vexl’s design as a non-custodial, open-source, non-profit tool.
Lea believes Bitcoin cannot function as true “freedom tech” unless users can acquire it privately, without KYC, without exposing their legal identities, and without relying on corporate intermediaries.
Vexl’s innovation is its real-world reputation model: users only see offers from people within their social graph, giving them context, trust signals, and the ability to assess risk in a way automated reviews never could.
The app is global but inherently local—each community must bootstrap itself through meetups, word of mouth, and grassroots adoption. Once a small core of users forms, growth accelerates rapidly.
Unexpected behavior emerged: people began using Vexl not just to buy bitcoin, but to trade eggs, honey, electronics, cookies, services, rentals, even drones—turning it into a hyperlocal, privacy-preserving marketplace.
Lea argues that “dirty fiat” poses far greater risks than “dirty bitcoin,” since fiat transfers create permanent, traceable records linking users to strangers, while Bitcoin’s stigma is largely manufactured through opaque blacklists.
Only one man-in-the-middle attack has occurred in four years, caused by a user bypassing verification; this reinforces the strength of Vexl’s design and the social incentives to behave well within one’s own network.
The team fought Apple for over a year until the app was removed from TestFlight, with Apple labeling cash-based exchange as “reckless.” This pressure led to the creation of the Freedom Store, a censorship-resistant app marketplace for open-source tools.
Lea views app-store gatekeeping, cash restrictions, and digital ID mandates as the real threats—not Bitcoin regulation itself—but the slow erosion of private communication and physical cash.
Vexl survives entirely on grants from OpenSats, HRF, SatoshiLabs, and others. The team collects no user data and monetizes nothing; they operate in a feedback vacuum, which makes motivation difficult.
What keeps Lea going are the stories—users forming real communities, building local economies, and using Vexl to trade goods and services privately, proving that a decentralized, human-scale economy can exist in the real world.
For Lea, Vexl represents not just a product but the embodiment of cypherpunk values: voluntary exchange, privacy by default, and the preservation of human agency in an increasingly surveilled financial system.
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