Industry

Crypto

Tech Stack

PHP, React

Years

2021

Links

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Overview

Paxful, a leading peer-to-peer cryptocurrency marketplace, serves a global user base of tens of millions across 130+ countries.

Danubio partnered with Paxful to internationalize the platform end-to-end - from frontend UI to backend systems - enabling a seamless experience in 40+ languages.

This case study examines how Danubio's full-stack internationalization (i18n) solution helped Paxful break language barriers, supporting consistent multilingual experiences across the marketplace web app, emails, two-way trade chats, user messages, and more.

The Vision

Paxful's vision is to make cryptocurrency accessible “for the 100%”, meaning everyone, regardless of language or locale, can participate in the global crypto economy.

Achieving this vision required a truly international platform that speaks the user's language. Danubio's task was to enable Paxful's global reach by building robust i18n infrastructure and workflows.

By localizing the platform, Paxful aimed to welcome new users in emerging markets and strengthen engagement in existing regions.

The end goal: remove language as a barrier to financial freedom on Paxful, reflecting its mission of a borderless, inclusive financial system.

Market Context

Founded in 2015, Paxful quickly grew into one of the world's largest people-powered crypto marketplaces. By 2023, it had connected over 12–14 million users worldwide – especially popular in the Global South – and was facilitating hundreds of millions in trades monthly.

The platform's appeal lies in its 350+ payment methods and ease of use, empowering users to buy or sell Bitcoin, Tether and more, even without bank accounts.

To maintain its rapid global growth, Paxful invested heavily in localization.

At the start of the project, Paxful's platform supported only a handful of languages, with frequent bugs, inconsistencies, and limitations across the stack. Danubio was brought in to overhaul this foundation, designing and implementing a brand-new internationalization framework from the ground up.

By the end of the engagement, Paxful was running with stable, high-quality support for over 40 languages — delivering a flawless multilingual experience across its global marketplace.

This broad localization was crucial for Paxful to serve diverse communities (Nigeria, China, Russia, Latin America, etc.) in their native tongues.

The Challenge

Danubio faced several complex i18n challenges in making Paxful's marketplace truly multilingual:

• Consistent Multi-Channel Localization

  • Ensuring all user touchpoints (web interface, mobile app, email notifications, help content) remained linguistically and stylistically consistent across 40+ languages.

  • This included translating dynamic trade terms, payment method names, and system messages uniformly.

• Complex Number, Date & Currency Formatting:

  • Paxful's global user base required precise localization of numerical values, dates, and currencies — which varied drastically across regions.

  • A single trade amount could appear as 1,000.00, 1.000,00, or 1000,00, depending on the locale. Dates followed formats like MM/DD/YYYY, DD.MM.YYYY, or YYYY/MM/DD, adding further complexity.

  • We also accounted for edge cases such as non-breaking spaces in digit grouping, language-specific currency symbols, and contextual formatting (e.g. currency code vs symbol display based on region).

• Right-to-Left (RTL) Support:

  • Adapting the UI for RTL languages like Arabic and Hebrew. This required flipping layouts and ensuring components rendered correctly in both directions without breaking the user experience.

• Grammar & Pluralization

  • Handling language-specific grammar, word order, and plural forms is trickier than it sounds.

  • Paxful's messaging (e.g. trade status updates: “X minutes left”, “Y offers available”) needed proper pluralization rules and word order for each locale, including languages with non-English sentence structure.

• Cross-Language Trade Chat

  • Paxful's peer-to-peer chat had to support seamless communication between users who spoke different languages.

  • We had to support a unified trade chat experience where each participant could view both user-generated and system-generated messages in their selected language.

  • This included automatic recognition and translation of written content, as well as real-time localization of key system prompts (e.g. “Payment marked as complete”) to ensure clarity.

  • For example, a buyer writing in Spanish and a seller reading in Russian would each see messages — including automated trade updates — in their native language, maintaining full transparency and avoiding miscommunication during critical trade actions.

The Solution

Danubio delivered a comprehensive internationalization solution, addressing the above challenges with a mix of technical engineering and process innovation.

• Full-Stack i18n Implementation

  • We internationalized Paxful's entire codebase, frontend and backend. This included introducing i18n libraries and middleware for string externalization, so no user-facing text remained hard-coded.

  • All UI labels, messages, and notifications were refactored to use translation keys, enabling easy updates across languages.

• Locale-Aware Formatting

  • We implemented robust utilities for locale-aware formatting of dates, numbers, and currencies.

  • We leveraged standard libraries (ICU/CLDR formats) to ensure, for instance, French users see “1000,00” while US users see “1,000.00” for the same value.

  • This maintained familiarity and trust in displayed financial data across regions.

• RTL Design Support

  • Upgraded Paxful's frontend styles and components to dynamically support RTL layouts.

  • We added conditional styles and adjusted UX elements so that Arabic, Hebrew, and other RTL translations would render with a natural reading order.

  • This included mirroring page layouts, aligning text and icons appropriately, and testing RTL screens for usability.

• Advanced Localization Frameworks

  • To manage grammatical nuances, Danubio utilized ICU message formats and pluralization rules in translation strings.

  • This allowed translators to provide language-specific variations (e.g. singular, plural, gender forms) within one message format.

  • The result was grammatically correct output in complex languages without manual string concatenation hacks.

• Contextual Translation & Testing

  • We worked closely with Paxful's localization team and vendor translators to ensure high-quality, context-aware translations.

  • We provided context notes for strings (especially for system/chat messages) so that translators could capture the right tone and meaning.

  • Finally, we facilitated extensive QA testing in each target language, catching issues like text overflow, misordered placeholders, or unclear phrasing before launch.

• Integration of Translation Management System

  • We integrated Paxful's codebase with a crowd-based translation management system (TMS) to streamline continuous localization.

  • New or changed text strings automatically sync to the TMS where translators could translate them.

  • The updated translations would then pull into Paxful's CI/CD pipeline. This automation meant content updates and new features could ship in all languages simultaneously, with minimal manual coordination.

• Collaboration and Agile Process

  • Throughout the project, our engineers worked alongside Paxful's in-house teams – working with engineering, QA, product managers, and external localization vendors.

  • We established a smooth workflow for i18n bug fixes and feature development, ensuring that adding a new language or updating a phrase was as straightforward as a code change.

  • By instituting best practices and knowledge transfer, Danubio enabled Paxful's own team to maintain the i18n infrastructure long-term.

The Result

Paxful's partnership with Danubio produced tangible outcomes that strengthened its global marketplace and user growth:

• Global Multilingual Platform

  • Successfully launched Paxful's platform in 40+ languages, laying the groundwork for further expansion to nearly 50 languages within a year.

  • This extensive localization opened Paxful to millions of new users in non-English-speaking markets.

• Consistent User Experience

  • Delivered a uniform, high-quality user experience across all locales. From the trading interface to confirmation emails, users receive communications in natural, context-accurate language.

  • The consistency across web, mobile, and email channels helped build trust with international users.

• Increased User Engagement

  • By speaking users' languages, Paxful improved engagement and retention globally.

  • New language launches directly translated into community growth – as Head of Localization Anna Iokhimovich noted, there is “satisfaction from seeing trade and the number of users growing” after adding languages.

  • Regions like Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America saw notable upticks in activity once localizations went live.

• Faster Localization Cycle

  • The integration of the translation platform into CI/CD accelerated Paxful's release cycle.

  • Translated content could be deployed within hours of an English string change, as opposed to days or weeks previously.

  • This agility ensured product updates (new features, promotions, etc.) reached global audiences at the same time as English-speaking users, keeping Paxful competitive and culturally relevant.

• Robust I18n Infrastructure

  • Our work put in place a scalable i18n framework for Paxful's future. Supporting a new language became a routine process – the platform could now handle complex scripts (from RTL Arabic to CJK characters) and intricate locale rules with ease.

  • The technical solution proved durable, requiring minimal maintenance as Paxful's features evolved.

• Empowered Internal Teams

  • Through close collaboration and knowledge transfer, Danubio empowered Paxful's internal engineering and localization teams to own and extend the i18n efforts.

  • Post-project, Paxful could continue adding languages and refining translations without heavy external dependency, benefiting from the automation pipelines established.

Conclusion

Danubio's end-to-end internationalization of Paxful's marketplace was a key enabler of the company's global growth.

By tackling the myriad challenges of multi-language support – from UI/UX adjustments to backend logic – Danubio helped Paxful deliver on its mission of a worldwide open financial platform.

The project's success is reflected in Paxful's ability to seamlessly serve users from over 130 countries in their native languages, fostering inclusivity and trust.

This case study of Paxful underscores Danubio's expertise in building robust i18n infrastructure and integrating automation to streamline localization.

In empowering Paxful's teams with the right tools and processes, Danubio not only solved immediate localization needs but also set Paxful up with a sustainable foundation to continue scaling its multilingual, people-powered marketplace for years to come.

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