Choosing a P2P counterparty: which numbers mean something, which are noise

What the listing screen is actually showing you

Start with what that screenshot demonstrates, because it is the most useful single observation on this page: the top row is frequently not the best price. It is a paid placement. Sorting by price and reading the rows underneath the promoted slot is a free improvement that most people never make, because the eye treats the first row as the recommendation.

The numbers, ranked by how much they tell you

Order count — the most informative

The number of completed trades. This is closest to a track record: it takes time to accumulate, and it cannot be manufactured cheaply. A counterparty with thousands of completed orders has a business that would be damaged by defrauding you over one trade. One with eleven has nothing at stake.

It is not proof of anything — an account can be sold or compromised — but of the figures on the screen, it is the one that costs the most to fake.

Average release time — informative, and undervalued

How long the counterparty typically takes to release the crypto after payment. It matters more than people expect, because that interval is when your money has left and you have received nothing. A counterparty who releases in minutes is operating a real process. One with a long average is either slow, or working with a rhythm that will leave you refreshing the page.

In the screenshot every visible row shows the same short window, which is normal for high-volume sellers — the number becomes discriminating at the other end of the list.

Completion rate — weaker than it looks

Here is the misreading. Completion rate is the proportion of initiated orders that completed, and it is dominated by buyers who opened an order and walked away, which is extremely common and says nothing about the seller. A busy, entirely legitimate counterparty will have a rate below 100% for reasons that have nothing to do with them.

What it is good for is the extreme tail. A rate that is very low is worth avoiding. The difference between 99.6% and 100% is noise, and treating it as a ranking is how people talk themselves into a worse price for no gain.

Price — informative, and the trap

The best price on the screen is frequently attached to the counterparty you least want. That is not a coincidence; an unusually good rate is the cheapest way to attract orders.

Our position, stated plainly: a fraction of a percent is not worth transacting with an unknown counterparty. If the top listing by price has a hundred orders and the third listing has eight thousand, take the third. The spread you give up is small and bounded; the downside you are avoiding is neither.

Verification badges — near-zero on their own

Badges indicate that the counterparty completed some process on the platform. They tell you nothing about the money they will send you, which is the actual risk. Read them as a floor, not a signal.

The payment method is the real decision

The listing's payment methods deserve more attention than any of the numbers, and for the opposite reason people usually look at them.

When you are selling, the payment method determines which of your accounts receives money from a stranger — and therefore which account is exposed if that money turns out to have a problem upstream. That is the mechanism described in cash in and cash out, and it is the main reason people end up with a restricted account.

Two rules follow, and they are not negotiable:

• The paying name must match the counterparty's verified name. Payment from a third party is a hard stop — it breaks the correspondence between the platform's record and your bank's record, which is precisely the correspondence you would need later to explain the transfer. Do not release, and raise it with the platform.
• Say what the transfer is, truthfully. We used to advise keeping crypto out of the reference field so it would attract less attention. That was advice about appearances, and we have dropped it. Fill the field honestly, or leave it to the platform's own flow, keep the matching order record, and give the same account of it to anyone who asks.

When you are buying, the same field matters for a duller reason: pick a method you can actually complete quickly, from an account in your own name. A method that takes you an hour to set up is an hour of price exposure and an hour of the counterparty waiting to cancel.

The rule that outranks all of it

Everything above is optimisation. This is the part that determines whether you lose the money:

Payment and release both happen inside the platform's order flow. That is what escrow means: the crypto is held by the platform from the moment the order opens, and released when the order completes. Step outside the flow and there is no escrow, no record, and no dispute process — you are wiring money to a stranger on the internet.

The scripts that get people out of the flow are worth knowing because they do not sound like fraud:

• "The platform is having issues, let us just do this directly."
• "Mark it paid first and I will release immediately, we can save time."
• "Cancel and I will send you a better rate on Telegram."
• "I have sent it, here is the receipt" — with an image, before anything has arrived.

The last one is the most effective, because a screenshot of a payment is trivially forged and looks exactly like proof. Confirm receipt in your own banking app, on the balance, before releasing. Not in a notification, not in a message, not in an image. Pending is not received, and a transfer can be recalled after it appears.

The order of operations

1. Sort by price, then read past the promoted row.
2. Filter to a payment method you can complete from an account in your own name.
3. Among what is left, prefer high order count and short release time. Ignore small differences in completion rate.
4. Check the order limits before opening — a listing you cannot fill wastes both parties' time and counts against the completion rate you were just reading.
5. Open the order and complete payment within the window, entirely inside the platform.
6. If selling: confirm the funds are actually in your balance, from the matching name, before releasing.
7. Keep the order record. Export it periodically. Future-you may need it, as described in cash in and cash out.