HardenedSteel shut down, and it appears Reto has solidified their position as the sole Haveno network.

This means potentially one person or a tiny group is controlling the entire peer to peer Monero market.

Anyone can observe with publicly available information, that the way this works is that the seeder has control over who can be an arbitrator. This is because you use their client, hooked to their seed server, to connect to other nodes.

Reto might be good, or bad. We don’t know yet.

The bigger question is not who is in charge, but how good the behavior of the buyers will be. Because Reto has in-person cash trades, where the seller locks up XMR. That means that the buyer can pull a gun on seller and demand they approve the trade on their phone. All you need is one incident, and this shit can hit the fan quick.