Not the @lnp2pbot, but the p2p marketplace that's on there, which is just called 'wallet' (I don't think US users can access it, maybe not UK either, but not sure).
Anyway, for context, my wife's nephew in Russia has been put in charge by his auntie of getting the rubles, converting to usdt, and sending to my wife here.
Now, I never bothered to ask what he was doing since I was just glad someone over there could finally send my wife her money without a ton and stress with the mother in law (people post 40 don't seem to want to know about bitcoin or crypto in general, don't know about p2p or anything).
Since Europe and the CEXs my wife uses (that I use for her) delisted USDT I figured he could send over USDC instead.
When he said he couldn't do USDC, but could do btc, I figured why not, wife can just convert to Euro straight away anyway.
After he sent the money and the wife got like 250 dollars less than expected, some investigation was needed, and I actually looked at the telegram wallet feature.
Sadly, what looks like happened was that the spread on ruble to btc was insane, I worked out that she paid basically a 16% spread, and I was reminded of my recent learning of this lesson #898653
The ruble usdt spread is pretty good because it's high liquidity so we never paid any attention, but since the btc to ruble number is so high 7 million something, it's visually harder to pick out compared to 88k or 84k.
But what did I learn about the wallet
Well, turns out it's straight p2p and doesn't have any escrow and only supports btc on chain, usdt, usdc, and eth. Trust me bro, yikes.
Most importantly, the spread is horrific on rub btc and, really, I can't see any reason not to use a CEX like bybit which does the same for Russians, but at least has escrow.
Really should have checked this out beforehand, but we shall chalk it up to a lesson learned.
It is interesting that Telegram has its own little p2p feature, which certainly seems popular, and underage kids can use it in Russia to get dollars (USDT) which is probably better than holding it in a Russian bank. It also indirectly gives young people exposure to btc and doing p2p exchanges which I think is good and hopefully prime them for going btc only later