Circles of Trust
A Circle is a community-backed merchant group run by one Circle Admin under shared on-chain protocol rules. Each Circle holds its own currency, merchant set, fiat balance, and USDC liquidity. Circles exist so that the people who know local sellers can operate and support them, instead of one central desk handling every market. As a buyer, you trade with merchants inside a Circle.
You do not manually pick a Circle today. The protocol assigns an eligible merchant to your order based on real-time factors such as liquidity, channel status, and availability. Manual Circle selection and reputation-based sorting are planned for a future release. When the app shows Circle information alongside an order, it reflects on-chain state such as merchant stake and order history.
A Circle gives a buyer two concrete protections. First, merchants stake USDC and Circle Admins stake $P2P to operate, so there is collateral behind the people you trade with. Second, each Circle is backed by insurance reserves. There are three pools. The Circle Admin Insurance Pool (CAIP) is a per-Circle reserve funded from a share of order fees. The Circle Admin Loss Reserve (CALR) is a per-admin buffer funded from a portion of admin rewards. The Pool Insurance Pool (PIP) is a protocol-wide backstop. The pools and their funding are in place on-chain, and settlement work and reward accounting run on-chain and are verifiable.
The full insurance claim workflow is being finalized and is not yet live. When it ships, claims will be raised by merchants against the pools when USDC is lost despite proper merchant behavior, and each claim will be reviewed before settlement rather than refunded automatically. As a buyer, your recourse for a bad trade is the order dispute path, not the insurance-claim path.
Your side of a dispute is covered in full under Disputes and Evidence. In short, a dispute can be raised once per order, and an authorized admin settles it on-chain by assigning fault. If the merchant is at fault, the order completes and the stablecoin settles to the recipient. Jury-based and governance-driven escalation tiers are planned for a future release.