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Documentation · Kaspa Escrow

How Kaspa Escrow works

Kaspa Escrow is a guarantor for P2P deals that physically can't steal: the money sits in an on-chain covenant, not with us, and no spend path in that covenant pays anyone except the buyer, the seller or the visible service fee. This page covers the contract, the deal lifecycle, the encrypted deal chat, disputes and the security boundaries — honestly, including what the contract can't do.

The covenant: ten paths, three possible payees

A deal is an instance of the open-source contract escrow.sil (Kaspa Toccata, mainnet) with two states: active (the dispute window is running) and disputed (waiting for a verdict). Its complete list of spend paths:

Release — buyer signsEverything to the seller (minus the fee). "I got what I paid for."
Refund — seller signsEverything back to the buyer (minus the fee). A seller can concede at any point, even mid-dispute.
Mutual — both signAny split the two sides agree on. The fee output is mandatory by design — otherwise "mutual" would be a free bypass of every other path.
Dispute — buyer signsFreezes the deal into the disputed state and starts the arbiter's deadline clock. No money moves.
Auto-release — keylessThe dispute window closed and nobody acted → funds go to the seller. Protects the seller from a buyer who received the goods and went silent.
Arbitrate — arbiter signsThree variants: all to the buyer, all to the seller, or a split between them. There is no path that pays the arbiter or any third party — the network rejects such a transaction outright.
Timeout — keylessThe arbiter missed their deadline → funds go to the deal's default side (normally the buyer), with no service fee. A deal can never hang, even if we vanish.

That's the whole trust story: we are not asking you to believe the guarantor is honest — the guarantor holds nothing and has no door to walk the money out of. Being precise about the boundary: the covenant guarantees funds can't be stolen; whether a disputed verdict is fair is the work of a human reading your evidence.

A deal, start to finish

  1. Create. Either side opens a new deal: role, type (goods / OTC exchange / service), amount, terms. Sellers of physical goods also pick a shipping geography — the other side sees it before joining. You get an invite link (a one-time code, valid 72 h).
  2. Join. The other side opens the link, sees all terms — including the dispute window — and joins. Each side's deal key is generated in their own browser and saved into their encrypted Desk profile.
  3. Fund. The buyer sends KAS to a funding address (their own — its key is in their profile) and presses "Lock into escrow": the browser assembles the covenant on-chain. From this moment the money is under the contract's rules, nobody's wallet.
  4. Settle. Goods delivered → buyer presses Release. Deal fell through → seller presses Refund. Problem → buyer opens a dispute during the window. Nobody does anything → auto-release to the seller when the window closes.
Deal size50 – 10 000 KAS (open beta; below 50 KAS the arbitration minimum would eat too large a share).
Dispute windowChosen by the deal's creator from six presets: 24 h / 48 h / 72 h / 96 h / 120 h / 7 days — shown to the other side before joining. Defaults by deal type: goods 72 h, OTC 24 h, service 120 h. Arbitrary values are deliberately impossible (no "micro-window" tricks that would strip the buyer of a real chance to dispute).
FeesCreating a deal — free. Release / refund / mutual — 0.5% (min 1.2 KAS, which also pays for the on-chain chat). Arbitration, only if a dispute happens — 2% (min 5 KAS). Timeout — no service fee. The fee is enforced by the contract itself and visible before you confirm. Telegram guarantors charge 3–10% and hold your money; we charge 0.5% and can't.

The deal chat: evidence that can't be forged

The chat inside every deal is not a support chat — it's end-to-end encrypted on-chain messaging (the Kasia protocol on the Kaspa BlockDAG). Each message is encrypted in your browser and anchored as a Kaspa transaction; photos, videos and documents are encrypted per-file with an integrity hash anchored on-chain. The server relays and stores only ciphertext it cannot read. The consequence matters in a dispute: the correspondence can't be forged, edited or backdated — it is the case file. A tiny on-chain fee for your chat messages is covered by the service.

Disputes: a rail, not a favor

  1. The buyer opens a dispute during the window; the funds freeze in the disputed state. Both sides submit their claims (refund / release / split) with their story.
  2. One side reveals its chat key to the mediator. The chat key is separate from the deal key — revealing it exposes the correspondence, never the money. Until someone reveals it, nobody — including us — reads the chat.
  3. The evidence is examined. Attachments are checked for integrity against their on-chain anchors, and an AI mediator reads the deal terms, the thread and the files, then proposes an outcome in minutes. The proposal is non-binding: it executes only if the conceding side signs it (a split needs both signatures).
  4. Disagree, or 24 hours of silence? The case escalates to a human arbiter, whose signing key is kept offline, off the server. The arbiter's verdict — all to buyer, all to seller, or a split — is still confined by the covenant to those destinations only.
  5. The arbiter goes silent? The contract's keyless timeout returns the funds to the default side after the deadline. Every deal terminates — by settlement, verdict or timeout.

When a deal closes, the sensitive material — claims, revealed evidence, forensics — is erased from the server. See Escrow privacy for exactly what is stored while a deal is live.

Security boundaries

  1. The arbiter can't steal — no covenant path leads outside the buyer/seller/fee triangle.
  2. The server can't steal — it never holds deal keys; the keyless paths (auto-release, timeout) hard-wire their payees.
  3. The chat is private until you open it — plaintext exists for the mediator only after a party voluntarily reveals a chat key, and that key can't move funds.
  4. The AI never executes anything — its proposal becomes real only through a party's signature or the human arbiter's; the covenant caps the outcome either way.
  5. The service dying ≠ losing the deal — timeouts are keyless and on-chain. The deal recovery page shows how a deal outlives the website.
Beta limits. The contract passed native VM equivalence tests and an adversarial on-chain cycle (52/52 self-tests); an external audit is still ahead. Deals are capped at 50–10 000 KAS. One thing no escrow can see is the off-chain world — whether the parcel actually arrived. That's precisely why the dispute rail exists, and why the tamper-proof chat is where your deal should live.

See also: Kaspa Escrow overview · deal recovery · the Marketplace — listings with this escrow built in