Escrow held by a contract, not by us
Two people, one deal, and a contract that can only ever credit the buyer, the seller or the stated fee address.
A StealthSwap escrow deal is a record on a chain you can read yourself. The buyer funds a contract, the seller delivers to a destination fixed before the money moved, and either side can settle it with the other.
We never take the funds. Our key pays gas and can submit only what a party already signed, so there is no moment where the money is in our hands and no wording anywhere that says otherwise.
- Free escrow
- No KYC
- No account
- Public by design
Read this before the rest
An escrow deal here is a permanent public record on a chain. The addresses, the amounts, the deadlines and the outcome are readable by anyone, today and in ten years. No KYC means we never ask who you are. It does not mean the deal is hidden. This is pseudonymous, not anonymous, and nothing on this page changes that.
We cannot move your funds alone
That is the whole claim, and it is written here as something to go and check rather than something to accept. Each of the three below is checkable without asking us anything.
Read the contract
The escrow contract is not upgradeable and has no proxy in front of it. The deployed address for each chain is published on the verify page, and the code sitting at that address is the code that decides who gets paid.
Contract addressesRecompute your own terms
Every field of your deal is hashed into one commitment that goes on chain the moment the deal opens. The verifier rebuilds that commitment inside your browser and never asks our server for the verdict.
Open the verifierWalk the ruling log
Each published ruling carries the hash of the one before it, and the digest is recorded on chain before any money moves. A ruling quietly deleted or reworded afterwards breaks a link that anyone can check.
Published rulingsA deal, step by step
Six steps, and the money is only ever in one of two places: the buyer wallet before funding, or the contract after it.
- 1
Write the deal down first
You both agree the asset, the amount, the bond, what is being delivered, where it has to arrive, and every deadline. Those fields are hashed into a single commitment that goes on chain when the deal opens, so neither side can quietly restate the deal afterwards and no version of it exists that the other side did not see.
- 2
The buyer funds the contract
The buyer sends the escrow asset to the contract from their own wallet. There is no path for anyone else to fund on their behalf. Each side also posts a bond, which is their own money at risk in the deal and comes back to them in full unless a ruling goes against them.
- 3
The seller delivers to the destination fixed at the start
The destination was written into the terms before funding and cannot be edited later. Only four kinds of deliverable are accepted, and all four are things a chain or a registrar can be read for, so what counts as delivered is a lookup rather than an opinion.
- 4
Either party settles it with the other
The buyer can release to the seller, the seller can refund the buyer, and together you can agree any split. Settlement credits your side inside the contract rather than pushing coins anywhere, so nobody's frozen address, reverting wallet or offline node can block the other party from being paid.
- 5
You withdraw to an address you signed for
A credit sits in the contract until you take it. You sign a withdrawal naming your own address and amount, and whoever pays the gas cannot change either, because both are inside what you signed. If you want paying in a different coin, the withdrawal is signed to a swap deposit address instead and the coins never pass through us.
- 6
Every deadline can be timed out by anyone
No state can get stuck because a counterparty went quiet. Each deadline has a public timeout that anyone can call once it has passed, and a fixed grace period sits between the two so acting late and timing out are never both possible at the same moment. A timeout never forfeits a bond.
Free. There is no escrow fee.
Not an introductory rate and not a discount we can withdraw next month. The fee is a number in the deployed contract, it is set to zero, and the contract will not open a deal whose terms disagree with it. Every cost that can touch a deal is listed below, including the ones that are not ours.
- Escrow service fee
- The contract caps the fee at 1 percent and it is set to zero on the deployed contract, which you can read for yourself rather than take from this page. The fee also has to match the terms exactly or the deal will not open, so no fee can appear on a deal after you signed it.
- Fee once a deal is contested
- The moment either party contests the deal on chain, the fee is forced to zero for the rest of it. The point is arithmetic rather than goodwill: it leaves whoever rules with no financial preference between the two possible outcomes.
- Bonds
- Each side posts a bond in the escrow asset. It returns in full on every ending except a ruling against you, and a missed deadline is never a ruling. Bond size is agreed in the terms before either of you funds anything.
- Network fees
- Every action here is a real transaction on a public chain and carries that chain's fee. Where our relayer submits an action you signed, we pay that gas.
- Payout in another coin
- If a seller takes payout in a different coin, that leg is an ordinary StealthSwap swap and carries the ordinary route pricing, the same service markup and the same conditions, including the possibility that a route declines, pauses, refunds or asks for verification on that leg.
0 percent today
Always zero
Set per deal
Paid by the sender
Ordinary swap pricing
No KYC, no account, no email, no ID
There is nothing to verify because there is nothing to open. We never take custody of the funds, so there is no balance of yours sitting somewhere that anyone would need your documents to release.
No KYC
There is no identity check to open, fund or settle a deal. No ID document, no selfie, no proof of address, no source of funds questionnaire.
No account
Nothing to sign up for, no password and no email address. A deal is a record keyed to a chat and two wallets, and you can leave the same way you arrived.
Nothing to freeze
We never hold the funds, so there is no balance of yours for us to review, hold or ask you to justify. The contract holds them and it knows only the two parties.
What you do need
A Telegram chat to run the deal in, a wallet you control on a supported chain, and the escrow asset already in it. That is the entire list.
One honest exception, and it is the only one. If a seller chooses to be paid in a different coin, that payout leg is an ordinary swap, and swap routes set their own conditions, which can include a verification request, a limit or a decline on that leg alone. Taking payout in the asset the deal was funded in avoids the question entirely.
Where the money sits, and what everyone can do to it
Including the one thing the contract cannot rule out. A product whose pitch is read the contract does not get to leave that part out.
Where the money actually sits
Funded escrow money sits in one contract, at one address, per chain. It is not upgradeable, there is no proxy behind it, and it cannot be replaced with different code later. A newer version would be a different address, and deals opened under the old one keep settling under the code they were funded under.
Settlement only ever credits the deal's own buyer, seller or the stated fee address. There is no other destination in the code, so there is no route by which a deal's funds reach us, another customer or anyone else.
A credit is durable. If a payout attempt fails for any reason, the credit is still sitting in the contract and can be taken again. Nothing is left in transit waiting for us to notice.
What we can and cannot do
We hold a key that pays gas. It can submit an action a party already signed and nothing else, so it cannot release, refund, redirect a withdrawal or change an amount. Losing that key costs us gas money and costs you nothing.
The operator can change a capped fee, change where that fee goes, stop new deals being created, set a minimum bond and take money that was never part of a deal. Not one of those touches a deal's state or anybody's credit.
Nobody at this company holds an arbiter key on the server. Where a deal uses an arbiter, the ruling is signed in a wallet held away from the servers, and the signature is pasted in.
What an arbiter can and cannot do
An arbiter is optional. Plenty of deals run with none at all, which is the mode that proves the contract does not need us.
Where you do choose one, it sits idle unless a party opens a dispute. It cannot open one itself, cannot touch a deal that has not been disputed, cannot pay itself and cannot pay us. Its only power is choosing between the two of you, or splitting between you.
One thing the contract cannot prevent: an arbiter who colludes with one party can move the funds to that party. That is inherent in letting anyone break a deadlock at all, so it is bounded instead of denied. An arbiter can only act once a party opens a dispute, can only choose between the two of you, can never pay itself or us, and its address is fixed inside the terms you signed before you funded. You can also run a deal with no arbiter at all.
Public forever, and not anonymous
Everything a deal does on chain is permanent and public. The funding, the amount, both party addresses, every deadline that passed, the outcome and the withdrawal are all readable by anyone, today and in ten years, by us, by your counterparty and by any analytics firm that cares to look.
That is the cost of a contract you can verify instead of a database you have to trust, and it cuts both ways. This product is pseudonymous, not anonymous. Nothing here removes an address from a chain, unlinks it from the addresses you funded it from, or makes a past deal private later.
Assume anyone who learns one of your addresses can read every deal it has ever been part of. If that is not acceptable for a particular deal, that is a reason not to do that deal here.
Published rulings are redacted before they go up, which is a different and much narrower claim: they carry no address, no handle, no exact amount and no free text either party wrote. The chain underneath them is still public.
What gets refused, and why it is refused early
Four kinds of deliverable are accepted: an on chain asset, an on chain token of a specific id, a domain transfer, and a signed handover. There is no other category, and the set is closed on purpose.
That single rule refuses account transfers, credentials, data, payment instruments and unverifiable services, because none of them has a destination that a chain or a registrar can be read for. It also refuses anything where the question would end up being whether the work was any good.
Refusing at the point of creation is a checkbox. Refusing later, once someone has funded and is waiting, is a fight. The refusal message is deliberately the same in every case and never names the rule that fired.
What both parties accept before any funding
The same lines the bot shows you in the chat, published here so you can read them before you ever open a deal.
- The funds go to a contract, not to us. We cannot release them, refund them or redirect them.
- Everything this deal does on chain is permanent and public, including the addresses and amounts. This is pseudonymous, not anonymous.
- Only the four listed deliverable classes are accepted. What can be argued over is limited to two questions: whether funding landed, and whether the deliverable reached the destination fixed at the start.
- Your bond is your own money at risk. It returns in full unless a ruling goes against you.
- Deadlines run on chain time and keep running whatever we do. If we pause, new deals stop and our own ruling service level extends, but no deadline the contract enforces is frozen.
- One thing the contract cannot prevent: an arbiter who colludes with one party can move the funds to that party. That is inherent in letting anyone break a deadlock at all, so it is bounded instead of denied. An arbiter can only act once a party opens a dispute, can only choose between the two of you, can never pay itself or us, and its address is fixed inside the terms you signed before you funded. You can also run a deal with no arbiter at all.
Escrow questions
- Do I need to pass KYC to use this escrow?
- No. There is no identity check anywhere in the escrow flow: no ID, no selfie, no proof of address and no source of funds questions. Nobody here can freeze a deal or ask you to justify one, because the money is in a contract rather than in an account we control. The single place verification can appear is a payout leg taken in a different coin, because that leg is an ordinary swap and the route carrying it sets its own conditions.
- Do I need an account, an email address or a password?
- No. There is no signup, no email and no password. You run the deal from a Telegram chat and act from a wallet you already control, and the only identifiers involved are the ones a public chain would have recorded anyway.
- How much does the escrow cost?
- The escrow fee is zero. The contract caps it at 1 percent and it is set to zero on the deployed contract, so that is a number you can read for yourself rather than a promise on a marketing page. A deal that gets contested has the fee forced to zero for the rest of its life. You still pay the chain its own fee on any transaction you send yourself.
- Who holds the money while the deal runs?
- A contract does. The buyer funds it directly from their own wallet, and settlement credits a party inside the contract rather than sending coins onward. There is no point in the process where we hold your funds or could choose to move them somewhere else.
- What happens if my counterparty simply disappears?
- Every deadline has a timeout that anyone can call once the deadline and a fixed grace period have both passed, so a silent counterparty stalls nothing. Which way a given timeout resolves is written into the terms before either of you funds, and a missed deadline never costs anyone their bond.
- What is a bond for?
- It is your own money at risk in the deal, and it is the only thing on the table that makes lying expensive. It comes back to you in full on every ending except a ruling against you. Time running out is not a ruling, so a bond is never forfeited to a clock.
- Who decides a dispute, and can you overrule it?
- Only the arbiter named in the terms can rule, and only after a party opens a dispute. We cannot overrule a ruling, reverse one, or rule on a deal where no arbiter was chosen. One thing the contract cannot prevent: an arbiter who colludes with one party can move the funds to that party. That is inherent in letting anyone break a deadlock at all, so it is bounded instead of denied. An arbiter can only act once a party opens a dispute, can only choose between the two of you, can never pay itself or us, and its address is fixed inside the terms you signed before you funded. You can also run a deal with no arbiter at all.
- What can a dispute actually be about?
- Two questions only. Did the funding land at the agreed asset, amount and deadline, and did the deliverable reach the destination that was fixed when the deal was created. Both are answered by reading a chain or a registrar. A dispute is never a judgement about whether something was good enough, which is why the accepted deliverable classes are so narrow. One thing the contract cannot prevent: an arbiter who colludes with one party can move the funds to that party. That is inherent in letting anyone break a deadlock at all, so it is bounded instead of denied. An arbiter can only act once a party opens a dispute, can only choose between the two of you, can never pay itself or us, and its address is fixed inside the terms you signed before you funded. You can also run a deal with no arbiter at all.
- What if the arbiter finds nothing to go on?
- Then the published outcome is a split, and it is stated that way before anyone funds rather than decided afterwards. A rule that favoured buyers would be farmed by buyers and a rule that favoured sellers would be farmed by sellers. A split is the only posture where lying costs you either way. One thing the contract cannot prevent: an arbiter who colludes with one party can move the funds to that party. That is inherent in letting anyone break a deadlock at all, so it is bounded instead of denied. An arbiter can only act once a party opens a dispute, can only choose between the two of you, can never pay itself or us, and its address is fixed inside the terms you signed before you funded. You can also run a deal with no arbiter at all.
- Can I be paid in a different coin than the deal was funded in?
- Yes. Your credit stays in the contract and you sign a withdrawal to a swap deposit address, so that leg is an ordinary swap with ordinary route pricing and ordinary route conditions. The coins go from the contract to the route and then to you, and never through an account of ours.
- Is any of this private?
- No, and it is worth being blunt about it. Every escrow action is a permanent public record on a chain: the addresses, the amounts, the timings and the outcome. Anyone can read it at any time in the future. This is pseudonymous, not anonymous, and no setting on this page changes that.
- How do I check any of these claims myself?
- Read the contract at its published address, recompute the terms commitment for your own deal in your browser, and walk the published ruling log. None of those steps asks our server for a verdict, which is the point of publishing them.
Start a deal, or check us first
Agreeing terms costs nothing and commits nobody until the buyer funds. Read the terms back on chain, and fund only once both sides match what you agreed in the chat. If it is your first deal here, run a small one and watch it settle before you trust it with more.
Escrow deals are real transactions on public chains and cannot be reversed once confirmed. Availability, limits and fees are set per deal and can change. A payout taken in another coin is an ordinary swap and carries that route's conditions, which may include verification, a decline, a pause or a refund. StealthSwap does not hold your funds, does not guarantee an outcome, and does not give financial, legal or tax advice.