Rabat – A jacket that has not left the closet in months, a camera collecting dust on a shelf, or an old gaming console that rarely gets used can still have value.
For Moroccan-American entrepreneur Mehdi Taifi, the question is what happens when people can put that value back into circulation without selling it first.
Taifi’s answer is Zèya, a Miami-based peer-to-peer marketplace where users can swipe through items in their area, match with other users, and exchange goods directly.
The platform has now surpassed 120,000 downloads across iOS and Android and has more than 38,000 Instagram followers.
From Wall Street to the swap economy
Taifi’s career began in finance and technology on Wall Street before he joined the early team at Robinhood, where he spent more than six years during a period of rapid growth.
He later joined Alpaca as Chief Risk Officer and previously built another company called RoleScale. He left Alpaca in November 2025 to focus on Zèya full time.
“Finance taught me how liquidity works,” Taifi said in an interview with Morocco World News (MWN), explaining how he now applies that thinking to what he describes as “the most idle asset class of all,” the things already sitting in people’s homes.
“The idea for Zèya started during a conversation with a close friend about barter and why it had never evolved for the digital age,” Taifi explained.
Taifi and his friend began discussing what a modern version could look like, including the possibility of swiping through items owned by people nearby and matching when both sides wanted what the other had.
This concept tackles an old economic problem known as the double coincidence of wants. “Historically, that made swapping difficult to scale,” Taifi told MWN. But today, “we have massive networks, smartphones, matching technology and AI.” He began asking whether modern technology could solve “one of the oldest problems in commerce.”
Zèya’s system starts with discovery. Users swipe right on items they want and left on those they do not. When both sides swipe right, the app opens a chat. Users can then complete an item-for-item exchange, add cash to a swap, or make a cash offer outright. The platform also uses verified profiles, reputation, address validation, and secure payments.
A marketplace beyond buying and selling
Taifi says he deliberately chose swapping because “the world doesn’t need another resale marketplace.” Existing platforms already let people sell unwanted items. Zèya instead asks users to consider what they could get for something they already own, which requires a behavioral shift.
“People understand buying and selling immediately because they’ve been conditioned to think that way their entire lives,” Taifi said. Zèya wants users to move from asking “How much can I sell this for?” to asking “What can I get for this?”
For Taifi, the longer-term goal reaches beyond physical products. He wants Zèya to become “a platform for value exchange” where users can offer an item, cash, an item plus cash, and eventually other forms of value. The company says skills and services are expected to join the platform in the fourth quarter of 2026.
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AI already plays a role in reducing the work involved in listing an item. Taifi sees a larger opportunity in matching.
“As Zèya grows, AI can increasingly understand what people own, what they want, what they’re willing to accept, where they are, and how different combinations of value could create a successful exchange,” he said. He sees AI eventually becoming “part of the intelligence layer powering the marketplace.”
The company has raised more than $2.5 million, while its downloads have crossed the 100,000 mark cited in Taifi’s interview responses.
He described the milestones as “meaningful signals” that people are interested in a different way of exchanging value, while stressing that “the metric that matters most isn’t how many people download Zèya” but whether swapping can become a normal part of how millions of people transact.
“The next milestone now is one million downloads,” he added.
Zèya’s next chapter focuses on building a larger network, increasing the number of items available in local markets, improving matching, and expanding the ways users can make offers. Taifi says the ambition goes beyond creating another marketplace.
“I want Zèya to change the question from ‘How much does it cost?’ to ‘What can I give you for it?’” Taifi concluded. “If we can make that question normal at scale, I think we can fundamentally change how people think about commerce, ownership, and value globally.”
