How much money do you need to start P2P trading?

There is no magic figure

People want one number and there is not one, because capital requirement is not about the amount, it is about what the amount has to do. Two merchants with the same money can be in completely different positions depending on how fast they turn it over and how much they keep idle.

What is true is that starting small works and starting careless does not. Plenty of profitable merchants began with less than most beginners assume, and lost money learning on capital they could not afford to tie up.

What your capital actually has to cover

Before deciding an amount, understand what it is being asked to do.

• The trade itself, obviously.
• Money sitting idle between buying and selling, which earns nothing while it waits.
• Trades that go slow or into dispute, where your capital is locked until it resolves.
• Fees on both sides, which come out of profit and not out of some separate budget.
• Enough spare that one bad trade does not end your ability to trade at all.

Start with what you can afford to have stuck

The practical rule: your starting capital should be an amount you could have completely frozen for two weeks without it affecting your life. Not lost, frozen. That is the realistic bad case for a beginner, and it happens for ordinary reasons like a dispute or a bank delay.

If that number is small, start there. Small and consistent beats large and panicked, because a merchant trading money they need back this week makes decisions that lose it.

Then measure, before you add more

The reason to know your numbers early is that adding capital to a business you cannot measure only makes a figure you do not trust get bigger.

P2Proof shows profit after fees per exchange and per currency, so when you do scale, you are scaling something you can actually see.