Trust, without anyone to trust
A stranger is about to send you money in a currency no blockchain can see. Four mechanisms make that safe, and none of them is a company promising to be fair.
What trust is built from
Escrow comes first
Funds are locked before fiat moves, every time. A buyer never sends money hoping the other side will honour it, and a seller never releases coins hoping payment turns up.
Reputation is earned, not bought
Every completed trade, every dispute and every response time is part of a public record tied to a wallet. Someone cannot buy a good reputation, and cannot leave a bad one behind by opening a new account.
Your identity stays yours
There is no KYC. Instead of asking who you are, the protocol lets you prove what you control — an email, a phone, a Telegram account — and it never establishes your nationality or legal status.
Known-bad wallets get flagged, and some get blocked
Independent providers publish signed risk information about wallets tied to fraud or sanctions. Most of it is advisory — your app can warn you, ask for confirmation, or ignore it. Above that sits a governance-maintained ban list, and a wallet on it cannot deposit into any vault anywhere on the protocol. Providers publish the evidence; only a governance vote adds or removes an entry, and both directions are recorded on chain. This is not yet built.
When a trade goes wrong
Either side can open a dispute. It is decided by independent arbitrators who stake their own OPEN on getting it right, and who cannot see the evidence until they have committed.
- 01
Either side opens a case
Raising a dispute costs the buyer nothing. The arbitration deposit is posted by the merchant from their liquidity vault whichever side opened the case, and they forfeit it only if the outcome goes against them. Both sides submit evidence: receipts, payment confirmations, the trade conversation. The deposit is specified and not yet charged.
- 02
Arbitrators stake to take the case
Qualified arbitrators choose cases rather than being assigned, and must commit their own OPEN before they are allowed to see the evidence. Because the evidence is hidden until they commit, there is nothing to bribe them over in advance.
- 03
They vote without seeing each other
Each arbitrator publishes a sealed commitment first and reveals their decision later, so no one can follow the crowd. The number of arbitrators on a case is not published, which keeps anyone from guessing how much is at stake.
- 04
The escrow settles the outcome
The decision executes on chain. The design pays arbitrators in the majority and takes part of the stake of those outside it, with penalties deliberately moderate — the aim is to deter negligence and collusion, not to punish honest disagreement. Neither the reward nor the penalty is implemented yet, so today a vote earns nothing and voting against consensus costs nothing.
There is no appeal in version 1. The commit-and-reveal vote, the staked arbitrators and the moderate penalties are the safeguards, rather than a second hearing.
Your money, your currency, no middleman.
Start with a five-minute overview, or read the whole thing.