Terms of Service

Last revised: 2026-11-02. Continued use constitutes acceptance.

1. Nature of the market

ShadowVault is a listings and escrow venue. We are not the seller of record and we do not hold stock. Vendors list, price, ship and answer for their own goods; the market supplies discovery, the escrow mechanism, dispute adjudication and the tooling around all three. Where a listing misdescribes a product, the vendor's obligation runs to the buyer, and the market's obligation runs to holding the coin until the listing is honoured or refunded.

Nothing here is a custody service in the banking sense. Balances shown in the interface are claims against escrow rows, not deposits you can withdraw on demand.

2. Accounts

One account per operator. Sock-puppet accounts used to farm review weight or to bid on your own listings are collapsed into one on discovery, and the surplus accounts lose their history.

Your PGP key is the account. Set it at registration or in settings; it is the key we encrypt dispute rulings and release notes to, and it is the key a signed appeal is checked against. Key loss is unrecoverable by design — there is no email reset, no security question, and no operator who can re-point an account at a new key. Back up the private half before you fund anything.

You are responsible for every action taken under a session you opened. Report a suspected compromise and the account is frozen for 24 hours while the last transitions are reviewed.

3. Escrow & settlement

Funds are held in a per-order escrow address from lock until the order confirms or a dispute closes. The vendor sees the order only after the sweep confirms, so a vendor cannot ship against a payment that never landed.

Settlement is final on release. Once the worker pays a vendor, the payout cannot be clawed back, including where the buyer confirms and later finds a problem the check window would have caught. Disputes must be raised before release to have any effect.

Reserve coverage is published in the market feed and cold balances sit at the addresses printed on canary.html. Coverage below 1.0 is disclosed rather than hidden; coverage below 0.95 pauses new checkouts.

4. Disputes

The dispute window is 48 hours from the ship timestamp. After it, the order auto-confirms and the window closes. Opening a dispute inside the window freezes the escrow row until a ruling issues.

Rulings are decided on three kinds of evidence and nothing else: the transition log, PGP-signed messages between the parties, and the vendor's prior history on comparable orders. Screenshots are treated as supporting material, not proof. Both sides get one statement and one rebuttal; the docket closes after the rebuttal.

Rulings are final. They are issued signed with the desk key — anything unsigned is not a ruling. Outcomes are release to vendor, refund to buyer, or split, and a split states the percentage and the reason.

5. Vendor obligations

Vendors post a bond before their first listing goes live. The bond is sized to the category and is forfeit, in whole or in part, against a ruling that finds the vendor at fault. It is returned on a clean exit after 30 days of no open rows.

Stock counts must be accurate at post time. Listing more than you can ship inside your stated dispatch window is the single most common fault and the most common reason for bond forfeiture. Repricing is free and instant; letting a listing sell out silently is not.

Repeated fault gets you delisted. Two forfeitures in 90 days drops you to probation — listings stay up but new orders route to the back of search. Three drops you off the market and returns the remaining bond after the last open row closes.

6. Fees

Escrow fee is 4% charged to each side at settlement. The mixer charges 4% on a standard job and 8% on a clean job with no change output and a maximised delay. Tool runs are billed at 0.15 USD per run against the same balance as orders.

Fees are quoted before you commit and frozen into the quote. A fee change never applies to an order already in escrow. Failed settlement attempts are not charged twice.

7. Liability

The market is provided as-is. We do not warrant that a listing is accurate, that a vendor will ship, or that a package will clear customs. Our liability is capped at the escrowed value of the affected order, and only while that order is still open.

After the check window closes we carry no liability for the goods. During a chain halt, a node daemon outage or a mempool stall, we carry no liability for delay — the escrow row survives the outage and settles when the chain does. Coin sent to a wrong address by the buyer, or to an address copied from a mirror other than a verified one, is not recoverable by us.

8. Changes

Changes to these terms are announced in the market feed with the revision date and a one-line summary of what moved. Continued use after the announcement is acceptance. Material changes — fees, dispute window, bond rules — take effect on the next order rather than retroactively, and the revision date at the top of this page always matches the feed entry.