P2P Trading Glossary

Peer-to-peer (P2P) trading is buying or selling cryptocurrency directly with another person, without a centralised order book matching you automatically. On platforms like Binance P2P or Bybit P2P, merchants post advertisements with a price and payment method, and traders choose which ad to fill.

A merchant is a verified user who creates and publishes P2P advertisements. Merchants set their own price, acceptable payment methods, and trade limits. They are the counterparty in every trade — a buyer or seller finds their ad and initiates the transaction.

The order book (also called the stakan in Russian-speaking markets) is the ranked list of all active P2P advertisements for a given trading pair. Ads are sorted by price — best price for the buyer appears at the top. The merchant at position #1 receives the most trade requests.

The spread is the price difference between the best BUY price and the best SELL price on a P2P market, or between your own BUY and SELL advertisements. In a spread strategy, a merchant maintains both a buy ad and a sell ad simultaneously, with the gap between them representing the gross profit per unit traded.

Related: P2P Automation: How It Works

Position refers to where your advertisement appears in the ranked order book. Position #1 means your ad is at the very top — the first one a buyer or seller sees. A lower position number generally means more trade volume, but also a tighter margin. Automation tools let you target a specific position and maintain it automatically.

Repricing is the automatic adjustment of your P2P ad price in response to competitor price changes. A repricing tool monitors the order book continuously and recalculates your price to keep your ad at the target position. Without repricing, your ad drifts down the list as competitors undercut you.

Related: P2P Automation: How It Works

Completion rate is the percentage of P2P trades you have started that were successfully completed (payment confirmed, crypto released). A high completion rate (typically above 98%) signals trustworthiness to potential trade partners and is a prerequisite for higher account tiers on most exchanges.

In P2P context, the maker is the merchant who posts the advertisement — they create liquidity. The taker is the user who selects that ad and initiates the trade — they consume liquidity. Most exchanges charge lower or zero fees for makers (who add liquidity) and a small fee for takers.

A price safety mechanism used by Pilotbot that prevents automation from pushing your ad price to extreme values. The three corridors are: (1) a hard corridor — an absolute floor/ceiling of ±19.9% from a reference rate; (2) a user corridor — a narrower range you define yourself; and (3) a competitor corridor — the live range derived from active competitor ads. Your price must stay within all three simultaneously.

Related: Compare Pilotbot

Anti-bot logic detects when a competitor's advertisement is being managed by an automated tool (bot) rather than a human. Common signals include abnormally fast price changes and prices that track yours with sub-second latency. Automation platforms like Pilotbot can detect these patterns and adjust their repricing strategy — for example, by not chasing a bot's price down.

Humanize (also called humanisation) is a feature that makes automated price updates appear more human-like. Instead of updating at exactly regular intervals with round-number amounts, the automation introduces small random delays and non-round price changes. This reduces the risk of triggering exchange anomaly detection systems.

A repricing strategy where your ad price follows the average or median of several competitor ads, rather than always chasing the single best price. This produces more stable prices and avoids getting caught in a price war with an aggressive bot while still remaining competitive with the majority of the market.

The desired rank in the order book that you want your advertisement to hold. For example, target position 1 means your automation tries to keep your ad at #1 in the list. Target position 3 means you aim to be third — accepting a slightly less competitive price in exchange for a better margin. If target position is set to 0, your ad price matches the best current price exactly.

The minimum price improvement your ad makes over the competitor at your target position. For example, an overtake step of 1 means your price is 1 unit better than the competitor immediately above your target position. A larger step wins position more reliably; a smaller step preserves margin. This is sometimes called the price step or tick increment.

In the context of P2P automation, 'makers' refers to the set of competitor advertisements that your repricing logic watches. For example, 'top 5 makers' means the five highest-ranked competitor ads are used to calculate your target price. You can configure which competitors to include or exclude (for example, excluding known bots or ads with very low available volume).

KYC (Know Your Customer) is the identity verification process required by exchanges before you can become a P2P merchant or increase your trade limits. It typically involves submitting a government ID and sometimes a selfie. Higher KYC tiers unlock higher trade volume limits and access to premium features on the exchange.