P2P v5.1.3

Release Date: January 27, 2025
Tags: SECURITY CRITICAL, TRADE MANAGEMENT, VALIDATION FRAMEWORK, NOTIFICATION SYSTEM, PERFORMANCE

Upgrade Notes

Breaking changes

• Changed: starting a trade now requires an explicit action rather than happening automatically when an offer is accepted.
• Changed: a message must contain at least one character; an empty message is rejected.
• Changed: raising a dispute requires selecting one of the predefined reasons.
• Changed: creating a payment method requires a valid icon selection.
• Changed: trade statuses, offer statuses and dispute priorities are now uppercase. Dispute priorities are HIGH, MEDIUM and LOW, where they were previously numeric.

Migration notes

• No new database migrations are required, and existing trades remain compatible. Status values are converted to uppercase automatically.
• Add the P2P fee configuration to your settings.
• Configure the rate limit keys in Redis.
• Set up the notification email templates.
• Enable the background job scheduler, which expires timed-out trades and releases their locked funds.
• Apply the rate limiting and validation to any admin endpoints you have added yourself, and enable CSRF protection on state-changing operations.

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Added

Trade state validation

• Added enforcement of the trade lifecycle, so an invalid status change — cancelling a completed trade, for example — is refused with a clear reason instead of being applied
• Added a check of the current status before any state change, blocking manipulation attempts

Rate limiting

• Added rate limits across all P2P operations, falling back to the caller's IP address for unauthenticated requests
  • Offer creation: 5 per hour per user
  • Trade initiation: 20 per hour per user
  • Messages: 100 per hour per user
  • Dispute creation: 3 per day per user
  • Search: 60 per minute

Balance locking

• Added proper escrow: a seller's funds are locked when a trade is created, and unlocked automatically if the trade is cancelled or expires
• Added double-spending prevention and a balance check before a trade can start

Trading fees

• Added a maker/taker fee model with configurable rates, defaulting to 0.1% maker and 0.2% taker
• Added minimum and maximum fee limits
• Added volume-based discount tiers, up to 50%
• Added a separate escrow fee calculation, and a net amount for both parties

Transaction atomicity

• Added all-or-nothing handling for financial operations — starting a trade and locking the balance, releasing funds and deducting the fee, and updating an offer with its payment methods. Any error rolls the whole operation back.

Trade initiation

• Added a complete trade creation flow, with amount validation against the offer's limits, payment method verification, automatic adjustment of the remaining offer amount, an expiry time derived from the auto-cancel setting, and a timeline event

Notifications

• Added event-driven notifications for trade initiation, payment confirmation and fund release
• Added dispute notifications to all parties and to admins
• Added email notifications for critical events
• Added in-app notifications with action links, and configurable notification preferences

Trade timeout handling

• Added background jobs that expire pending trades after their timeout period and release the locked funds
• Added archiving of completed trades older than 90 days
• Added hourly reputation score updates
• Added expiry handling for inactive offer listings

Paginated trade history

• Added pagination to trade history, 20 items by default and 100 at most
• Added filters by status, type, currency and date range
• Added search by trade ID or counterparty, and sorting by date, amount or status
• Added summary statistics

Validation framework

• Added consistent validation of trade amounts against min/max limits, payment methods, locations against ISO country codes, price configuration, user requirements, and dispute reasons against the predefined options

Error handling

• Added a P2P error boundary, so a failure in one area no longer takes down the page
• Added error notifications that state what went wrong and offer a recovery action
• Added automatic retry for transient errors

Dispute evidence

• Added validation of uploaded evidence: images, PDFs and text only, 5MB per file, extension verification, and a maximum of 5 evidence items per dispute

Dispute priority

• Added automatic priority assignment, so the admin queue can be worked by priority
  • HIGH: fraudulent activity, payment not received, amounts over $1000
  • MEDIUM: amounts between $100 and $1000
  • LOW: other disputes, amounts under $100

Authentication flow

• Added clear login prompts for unauthenticated users, login buttons in error notifications, preservation of the page they were on, and visual indicators on actions that require signing in

Reputation

• Added automated reputation calculation from completed trades and success rate, average rating from trade reviews, and dispute history
• Added milestone notifications at 10, 50 and 100 trades, and trusted trader status eligibility

P2P permissions

• Added a P2P permission system with view, edit and delete permissions per resource type, plus dispute resolution, settings management and super admin permissions
• Added ownership-based access with admin override, and wildcard permissions for flexible role management

Audit logging

• Added an audit trail categorised by risk (low, medium, high, critical), with automatic security alerts on high-risk events
• Added financial operation tracking with full metadata, and admin action attribution
• Added audit log export for compliance
• Added auditing of every balance lock and unlock, and risk assessment on trade initiation based on amount
• Added rate limits of 50-100 requests per hour on admin endpoints, permission-based access control, and tracking of unauthorized access attempts

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Changed

Performance

• Changed the database indexes on frequently queried fields, so trade history and offer search return faster
• Changed offer and trade queries to fetch related records together, removing repeated lookups

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Fixed

Security

• Fixed a cross-site scripting vulnerability in trade messages. All user-supplied text — messages, trade terms, offer descriptions and admin panel input — is now sanitized, and HTML is stripped.
• Fixed funds being released twice under a race condition. A release is now claimed before it runs, with a 30-second lock and an hour of result caching, and it falls back gracefully if Redis is unavailable.
• Fixed funds being released on a trade that had already been processed.

Critical fixes

• Fixed a missing trade creation step that prevented offers from being accepted at all
• Fixed funds being released without validating the trade status first
• Fixed a race condition when the same trade was operated on concurrently
• Fixed a mismatch in the offer approval status format
• Fixed locked funds not being released when a trade was cancelled

Major fixes

• Fixed admin panel messages not being sanitized
• Fixed the fee calculation applied when funds are released
• Fixed a way to bypass payment method validation
• Fixed disputes being created without a reason

Minor fixes

• Fixed trade timeline events appearing out of order
• Fixed the expiry date calculation
• Fixed notification delivery failures
• Fixed search result pagination
• Fixed the offer amount not updating after a trade