Curating the market page — lenses, suggested counterparties and locale detection

/p2p/market is the single front door to your marketplace. It absorbed the old /p2p/offer table and the separate /p2p/guided-matching wizard, so it is the page every visitor lands on and the only place their first impression is formed.

Four settings on Admin → P2P → Settings → UI & Display shape that first impression. All four are read. They were stored-but-unread for a period and the settings page still carried a "NOT YET READ" note against them; that is no longer true, and this page is the current description.

Key	Type	Default	Decides
p2pDefaultMarketLens	select	match	which of three views the market opens on
p2pShowTradersLens	switch	on	whether the third view exists at all
p2pFeaturedPicksCount	number	3	how many suggested counterparties the shelf carries
p2pDetectVisitorLocale	switch	on	whether the board opens on the visitor's own currency

p2pDefaultMarketLens — which view opens

The market has three lenses, switched by a tab strip at the top of the page:

Value	Tab	Shows
match	Find me someone	a shelf of suggested counterparties, with the full board underneath
offers	All offers	the offer board directly
traders	Traders	people rather than offers

The setting decides which one an unqualified arrival sees.

A ?lens= in the URL always outranks it. The lens is part of what somebody sent you, so a shared link opens the view it names regardless of this setting. The three accepted URL values are the same three above.

Anything else — a typo, an empty row, a value from an older release — falls back to match. The same fallback applies if you select traders here while p2pShowTradersLens is off: the market resolves the active lens to match rather than rendering a tab that does not exist.

The lens is synchronised into the URL as you switch tabs, because it changes what is on the page. The filter style is deliberately not — see below.

p2pShowTradersLens — whether the Traders view exists

Adds the third lens, which lists counterparties ranked by completed trades and how fast they release, rather than listing offers.

Turn it off on a young marketplace. A short list of people tells every visitor exactly how thin the book is, in a way a short list of offers does not.

Switching it off does two things, and the second is the one that matters:

1. The tab is removed from the strip.
2. A bookmarked ?lens=traders is redirected back to match. Switching a view off has to mean switching it off — otherwise the one visitor most likely to hold that link is the only one who still sees it.

p2pFeaturedPicksCount — the suggested-counterparty shelf

Range 1–12, default 3. This is how many cards the "Find me someone" lens puts in front of a visitor.

Three sit side by side. Above three, the row becomes a horizontal slider — a native snap-scrolled shelf with arrow buttons — so extra suggestions cost a swipe instead of a taller page. Set it to 1 if you want the market to make a single recommendation.

The value does two jobs and both are required:

• It lays the shelf out, including the skeleton drawn before the picks land. The skeleton keys off the setting rather than off how many picks came back, because a skeleton that guesses a grid where a slider will render is exactly the page shift a skeleton exists to prevent.
• It is passed as ?count= to the picks endpoint.

The endpoint clamps count to 1–12 and defaults to 3; anything else is treated as a hand-edited settings row. It used to stop at a hard-coded three, which made this setting change the skeleton and nothing else — raising it drew extra placeholder cards that then resolved to nothing.

How a pick is chosen and labelled

The endpoint delegates to the same board query the offer list uses, so a recommendation can never vanish when the visitor opens the full list. It fills three named slots first, then tops up by score:

Label	Headline
best	Best overall
cheapest	Cheapest (buy side) / Highest price (sell side)
safest	Safest
alternative	Also available

On a thin board one offer can be best, cheapest and safest at once, in which case the shelf is shorter than the count rather than repeating a card.

The endpoint is public but knows who is asking

GET /api/p2p/market/picks is unauthenticated — a signed-out visitor gets picks — but it is declared optionalAuth, so a valid session is read when there is one. That changes two things:

• The viewer's own offers are dropped from the picks. Every card here is a recommendation to open a trade, and a trade against your own offer 404s — so a pick nobody can act on is worse than one fewer pick. This is picks only: the All offers board keeps a maker's own rows, marked and ranked, because a position in a price-ordered list is the thing a maker comes to it for.
• Prior counterparties are surfaced, and the card says so. A repeat counterparty also scores higher.

A missing or invalid token simply leaves the caller anonymous; the route never refuses.

p2pDetectVisitorLocale — opening on money the visitor recognises

On, the market asks one endpoint where the visitor is and what money they think in, and pre-fills the currency and country filters from the answer.

The precedence, strongest first:

#	Signal	Answers
0	an explicit ?fiat= / ?country= in the URL	both — and the endpoint is not called at all
1	the caller's own P2P history	currency only
2	the country on their profile	country, and a currency inferred from it
3	a CDN geo header, then the cached IP lookup	country, and a currency inferred from it
4	the busiest fiat on the board	currency, client-side, as the last resort

History outranks the profile for the currency only, because the profile answers "where do you live" and the currency is then a second guess on top of the first. History answers "which money do you price in" directly, from rows this person created. History never answers the country: nothing in a trade states where the caller is, and the only country on the record is the maker's.

Turning the switch off skips the request entirely, and the board falls back to the busiest pair — which is also what happens whenever detection finds nothing.

Whichever way it resolves, the board states what it assumed and the visitor changes it in one click. When a country was assumed and then dropped for emptying the board, the page says that too rather than silently widening.

Detection is fired once per page load, and only after the facets have loaded — they are the authority the two guards consult, and asking earlier means the answer arrives with nothing to check it against. Nothing here restricts, prices or settles anything; it is separate from the geo-restriction pipeline, which decides who may trade, and it works with that feature switched off.

Filter style is no longer an operator setting

The guided sentence and the classic filter row are not two products. They are the same query written for two different readers — and which reader is at the keyboard is a fact you cannot know. The desk that opens this page forty times a day and the first-timer arriving from a share link are on the same install.

So /p2p/market carries a Guided / Classic switch above the filters, and remembers each browser's choice in localStorage under p2p.market.filterStyle. Per browser, not per account: somebody signed out has a preference too, and this decides nothing about anyone's money — it decides which of two controls writes the same six values.

The switch is not drawn on the Traders lens, which has no filters under it.

The style is deliberately not in the URL, in either direction. Every other param on this page changes the response; the filter style changes not one byte of it. Putting it in the query string would make a desk trader's shared link hand a first-time buyer the control row they came here to avoid.

The guided sentence, and the endpoint that is not behind it

The guided presentation is one sentence with editable slots. It collects exactly the same six values as the classic row, into the same intent object, which is synchronised into the URL and sent to the board:

Slot	Intent field	Board query
buy / sell	side	side
the asset	currency	currency
the amount	amount	amount
the money you pay in	fiat	fiat → priceCurrency
how you pay	paymentMethodId	paymentMethods
where	country	country

The payment-method slot is the one place the two names diverge: the page writes method into its own shareable URL, but the request sends paymentMethods, which is the only name board.get.ts declares and reads (comma-separated ids). A hand-built ?method= on the API is silently ignored.

Nothing below the filter line knows which presentation is on screen. The country slot renders a country name rather than the raw ISO alpha-2 code stored on the offer, and any is a real, selectable value on the payment-method and country slots — both presentations prepend it to the facet list. The asset and currency slots have no such entry; they take the board's facets unchanged. You widen those by clearing the slot, not by choosing any, and the "Any currency" the classic row shows is the placeholder for an unset slot rather than an option in the list.

What is not on this screen

Three switches on the Platform tab — p2pEnabled, p2pMaintenanceMode and p2pAllowGuestBrowsing — draw banners on this page but are not enforced by any P2P API route. The market board endpoint is deliberately unauthenticated and answers anyone. See P2P settings.