Resolving a dispute

A dispute is a decision about somebody else's money, taken on incomplete information, that cannot be undone. The screen is at /admin/p2p/dispute and needs view.p2p.dispute to read and edit.p2p.dispute to rule.

The queue

Each row shows the trade, the amount, who filed, who it is against, the reason, the priority and the age. Three statuses:

Status	Meaning
PENDING	filed, unclaimed
IN_PROGRESS	an admin is working it
RESOLVED	ruled, and the escrow settled — or withdrawn by the trader who filed it

Priority is assigned automatically at filing — HIGH for FRAUDULENT_ACTIVITY, PAYMENT_NOT_RECEIVED or an amount above 1000; MEDIUM above 100; LOW otherwise — and cannot be changed afterwards.

The traders can see how long they have been waiting

The trade room shows both parties a clock beside Under review: how long it has been since the dispute was opened, and how much of your stated target remains. That target is Dispute Review Target (hours) on P2P settings, 48 hours by default.

It is worth setting to something you can meet. Before it existed, "under review" read identically at hour two and hour thirty and the trader's money was frozen behind it, so the only way to find out whether anything was happening was to open a support ticket — a second queue, staffed by you, asking about the first one. Past the target the room says the case is overdue, which is a promise you have visibly missed; raise the number rather than let that be the normal state.

Nothing resolves when the clock runs out. An escrow decided by a timer would pay somebody out on silence alone.

Cases that withdraw themselves

A trader can withdraw a dispute they filed, from the trade room, and a case that disappears from your queue with the outcome WITHDRAWN is one of these rather than something you missed.

It is deliberately narrow: only the trader who filed it, and only while the dispute is still PENDING. Once you move it to IN_PROGRESS you are reading evidence and forming a decision, and the button is gone — a case cannot be pulled out from under you, including by a filer who has been talked into it.

Nothing is unwound, because nothing had moved: filing a dispute writes a row and changes the trade's status, and withdrawing puts the status back. The record stays — the trade keeps its disputedAt stamp, the timeline keeps both the opening and the withdrawal, and the dispute keeps its evidence and messages with a resolution reading WITHDRAWN. The same trader can file again if the matter turns out not to be settled, which is what makes the button safe to offer.

Most of what this removes from your queue is the same case: a buyer files the moment a seller goes quiet, and the payment lands or the seller answers minutes later. Those used to sit until somebody read them.

What you are looking at

Opening a dispute gives you everything on one screen:

• The trade — amount, price, total, currency, wallet type, both parties, the offer it came from, and the current escrow status.
• The timeline — the authoritative record. Every status change with its timestamp, every chat message with its author, every admin action.
• The payment details snapshot — what the buyer was actually told to pay, taken at the instant the trade opened. This is the agreement; anything sent in the chat afterwards is not.
• The evidence — what the filer attached, plus anything an admin has added.
• The messages — the dispute's own thread, separate from the trade chat.
• Admin notes — internal, never shown to users.

You can add evidence yourself (images), post a message that both parties see and are notified about, and record internal notes. Notes are where your reasoning should go; the notification a user receives is short and the audit entry is structured rather than narrative.

Reading a case

The three questions that decide almost every P2P dispute:

Where the record genuinely does not settle it, SPLIT exists. It is not a cop-out — it is the correct answer when both parties acted in good faith and something outside the platform failed.

The four outcomes

Both the dispute door and the trade force-resolve door offer the same four, and both route through the same escrow authority, so they cannot disagree about what a word means.

Outcome	Escrow settlement	Trade ends as	Platform fee	Offer capacity
BUYER_WINS	whole escrow to the buyer	COMPLETED	charged	not restored
SPLIT	divided by an explicit buyer share	COMPLETED	charged on the buyer's share only	not restored
SELLER_WINS	escrow back to the seller	CANCELLED	none	restored
CANCELLED	escrow back to the seller	CANCELLED	none	restored

SELLER_WINS and CANCELLED are identical in their money effect. The difference is what the record says and what both parties are told: one is a finding, the other is "this trade should not have happened".

Setting a split

Two ways, and one takes precedence:

Field	Meaning	Range
buyerPercentage	percentage of the escrow the buyer receives — wins if both are sent	0–100
buyerShare	absolute gross amount to the buyer, in the trade currency	0 to the escrowed amount

Neither given: an even 50/50 split. The authority clamps whatever you ask for to what is genuinely held, so an over-large share cannot overdraw the escrow.

The fee is taken from the buyer's share only, and never from the seller's remainder — a seller getting their own funds back is not taxed for it.

What actually happens when you rule

One transaction:

1. The escrow settles through the single authority, which locks the trade, guards on escrowStatus so it can be paid out at most once across every door, charges the fee, syncs ecosystem chain ledgers for ECO wallets, and draws down the parent offer's attributed escrow.
2. On SELLER_WINS or CANCELLED, the offer's advertised capacity is restored — capped at its original total and, for a SELL offer, at the escrow genuinely still held, so it can never re-advertise liquidity that has left.
3. The trade moves to COMPLETED or CANCELLED, with resolution recording the outcome, your notes, your user id, the timestamp, and the real figures the settlement produced.
4. DISPUTE_RESOLVED is appended to the trade timeline.
5. The dispute is marked RESOLVED with resolvedOn and the same figures.
6. Activity and admin-audit entries are written inside the transaction, so a failure rolls the log back with the money.

After the commit: a WebSocket status broadcast to whoever has the trade open, and notifications to both parties.

The guards

Four refusals you will meet, all of them deliberate.

Marking a dispute RESOLVED without an outcome is refused with a 400. Closing the case without one used to leave the trade DISPUTED and its escrow stranded with nothing left to settle it.

A resolved dispute cannot be re-ruled. A second ruling returns 409: "This dispute has already been resolved and its escrow settled. Re-open it before recording a different outcome." The money was never at risk — the escrow authority settles once — but the recorded outcome, the resolver and the notes were being overwritten, so the audit trail showed the last ruling rather than the one the funds actually followed. Re-opening is a deliberate act: change the status first, then rule.

A ruling that moves nothing says so. The response carries a settlement summary, and where nothing moved it adds a warning — either "this trade's escrow had already been settled" or "no escrow was held for this trade". Both mean the ruling is recorded but the money is not where the ruling says it is.

When the escrow has already gone

This is the case that needs a human answer rather than a button.

It happens when the seller released before the dispute was filed, when the expiry cron returned the funds, or when another admin resolved the trade from the trades screen. The dispute is still open, and there is nothing left to settle.

What to do:

The same applies to a complaint about a trade that already completed normally. COMPLETED is terminal precisely so a settled trade cannot re-enter the escrow money path — a second payout would be drawn from whatever else the seller was holding, which in practice is another offer's escrow and another customer's money.

Keeping the desk honest

• Rule from the timeline, not the chat's tone. The loudest party is not usually the wronged one.
• Write the note before you press the button. If you cannot state the finding in two sentences, you are not ready to move somebody's money.
• Do not promise an outcome in a dispute message. Both parties see those, and a message that pre-announces a ruling makes the eventual notification look like a reversal.
• Watch the 3-per-24-hours dispute limit. A user pinned against it is either being systematically defrauded or is the problem. Both are worth investigating before the next case lands.