Overview
What it is
Settleo Escrow is the piece of Settleo that actually holds funds during a trade:
a non-custodial 2-of-3 escrow made of two parts — the on-chain
settleo-escrow-contracts (Foundry/Solidity) and the off-chain
settleo-escrow-orchestrator that drives fund / release / refund / dispute
and settles the result against the ledger.
The problem
In a P2P trade, neither counterparty trusts the other, and a good design also means neither of them has to fully trust the platform. Custodial escrow makes the operator a single point of theft and a single point of failure.
The architecture
Funds sit behind a 2-of-3 signature scheme (buyer, seller, platform), so a
release requires agreement between two independent parties and no one party can
unilaterally move money. The orchestrator translates trade lifecycle events into
escrow actions and, once an outcome is final, asks settleo-ledger to record
the settlement — it never writes balances itself.
Highlights
- Disputes route to
settleo-dispute, which resolves them with the same 2-of-3 discipline (arbitration, evidence bundling, SLA timers). - Because release is on-chain and multi-party, the platform's own compromise is not sufficient to drain an escrow.