How much can you actually earn from P2P trading?
A realistic look at P2P merchant income in African markets, why the numbers you see online are misleading, and what determines yours.
Why the numbers you see are useless
Screenshots of monthly volume are the most common thing shared and the least useful. Volume is how much money passed through, not how much stayed. A merchant showing enormous turnover on a thin spread can easily earn less than a smaller one running a wider margin.
Anyone quoting income without stating spread, turnover and fees is telling you nothing you can use.
What actually decides it
Three things, and only three.
- Your spread. What you make per unit, before fees.
- Your turnover. How many times your capital cycles in a month.
- Your losses. Disputes, reversals and mistakes, which nobody includes in their screenshots.
The uncomfortable part
Most merchants cannot tell you their own figure within a reasonable margin. They know their volume precisely and their profit vaguely, which is exactly backwards.
That is not carelessness. It is that the exchange shows volume clearly and makes profit after fees genuinely hard to compute, especially across two platforms and 180 days of history that keeps disappearing.
Know yours
The only earning figure worth anything is your own, computed after fees, from your real orders. P2Proof does that automatically from a read only key, in your own currency.