A word on "market manipulation"

“Margin limits are set to maintain trade balance on the platform and to prevent market manipulations.”

Paxful’s staff really needs to investigate what the term "market manipulation" entails.

"Market manipulation refers to artificially inflating or deflating the price of a security or otherwise influencing the behavior of the market for personal gain."

By setting "margin limits" in a "P2P" marketplace, Paxful is:

• Temporarily propping up the average trade price in their marketplace, resulting in increased revenue from fees for Paxful.
• Eliminating vendors who are less stringent on their requirements and/or have higher operating expenses.
• Eliminating illiquid categories on Paxful that have never traded close to the “margin limit”.

What's left in these illiquid categories are the less scrupulous vendors whose actual rates are NOT as advertised, the real rates are often posted in the offer terms like this:

$200 card - open a trade for $60

$400 card - open a trade for $120

$500 card - open a trade for $150

$1000 in cards - open a trade for $300

$2000 in cards - open a trade for $600

If Paxful has a genuine interest in reducing market manipulation (and not just propping up their own market), they should bring in market makers of their own or stay out of it and let vendors set their own rates in accordance with the logistics, expenses and profitability of that particular category in this "P2P" marketplace.

"Having a high offer margin (i.e. 100%, 200%,500%, 900%) that doesn't reflect the actual price that will be paid in trades is considered as fake advertising and is forbidden by our TOS."

I find this to be slightly disingenuous - for vendors selling Bitcoin, "fake advertising" of price cannot possibly be an issue because the vendor's Bitcoin is locked into escrow and that amount is visible to the buyer before the trade begins. A seller of Bitcoin cannot release less Bitcoin to the buyer than is in escrow.

This would appear to be a poorly guided attempt by Paxful to bump up revenue from fees in the short term without realizing the long term impact it will have as vendors leave or begin to question whether they will be suddenly priced out of the market one day due to arbitrary fundamental changes to the market. If Paxful cared about market manipulation they would value keeping their markets as liquid as possible.

To make matters worse, it looks like as of March 6, 2020 certain vendors are still able to trade at rates below the posted margin limit while others cannot. Giving a drastic advantage to a couple market participants is just another telling sign that Paxful.com has become the opposite of a free market. Go trade regulated securities if you want to feel "free", the free P2P marketplace is dead on Paxful.com as far as my team and I can tell.

Vendors: If you’re leaving Paxful, what platforms are you moving to? Any thoughts on CoinCola.com ? Please share and comment if you're in favor free market price discovery.