Escrows are one of the most commonly used financial products in today’s world. Designed to securely transfer funds from a buyer to a seller through an independent third-party escrow agent or service, who holds the payments, and in some case the goods for quality assurance, until the terms of deal have been completed by both parties.
An aim to apprehend how familiar are stackers with escrow services, providing a space to share experiences. Can be from any side, as a buyer, seller, escrow agent or service, or even a platform builder.
What brought you into the escrow landscape? What was your initial need and how it went?
LN hold invoices work pretty well.
Using Lightning for escrows would be the ideal, especially for low value items. Do you know any tool or wallet that allow users to manage such thing?
A LN node is required in this case. One could ideally practice with Polar. Then, when comfortable enough, install in an existing node @Alby Hub to manage multiple HODL invoices.
Not ideal for routing nodes though because Hold Invoices can take up significant transaction space, even those involving small amounts, and the Lightning protocol allows 483 concurrent HTLCs to conform with the standard transaction size.
Without an LN node, one could also use Robosats coordinators as escrow service, but both parties must already trust each other and sync to not allow others to take the offer.
Not sure robosats is the right way to go. I'll explore Albyhub and see if useful for coordinating escrows. Thanks
Valet ♦️ allows to "hold" incoming payments. There is CLN plugin too. Good one
Pity is only for android, ideally something OS-agnostic will be better to enable everyone to play in the game of trade. I'll give it a try anyway
We don't have VCs $$$ to maintain OS agnostic wallets. Besides, Valet ♦️ is only on FDroid due to Googles KYC policy.
Only for FDroid, lol, sure... the apk runs on any android phone, you should know that. I was simply saying that, despite being a great app, something that is web based or can be downloaded locally and run offline would be more suited for this.
How do you think it could work Lightning offline escrow?
ecash
good answer! Try also to put it on zapstore.dev
Great recommendation. Would check this out right away.
You mentioned Valet in one of your articles, I think the one where you described Private banks over lightning. Thank you for the mention.
Yes Valet is a good option with hosted channels.
That will help distribution for sure
https://github.com/supertestnet/hodlcontracts
Have been exploring it some time ago. It's the ideal tool, need to figure out where to install it together with LND. It also is apparently available only for
testnet, or it could be disabled somehow to make it work onmainnet?Multisig could replace some escrow services
I totally agree, I think already does. What's missing are tools to improve and ease the experience for those not familiar with it.
Which tools do you prefer to enable remote multisig?
BitcoinSafe is a good option, also Nunchuk.
I'll go and try both right now, thanks. Have you tried? What's your experience?
I've used escrow services to secure payments from clients. However, I've had mixed experiences. One time, the escrow service held up the payment for an extended period, because of issues with the client's account.
Well it cannot always go straight. Inconvenient challenge us and allow us to learn. Do have charged extra fees for the unexpected extended period?
Was the trade paid with bitcoin? Which tools do they use to orchestrate it?
Are escrows needed where trust exist?
Probably not, I'd avoid the use of third parties at all costs if there's already trust. Some always prefer an extra guarantee and if both parties agree on using it I don't see any issue either.