Held until you confirm receipt.
Escrow holds your money between paying and receiving. Anubis runs standard 2 of 3 multisig.
You fund the order, the vendor ships, you confirm receipt, and the coin releases. If you never confirm, the order auto-finalises after a set window. Disputes route through moderators who read signed evidence, and dispute outcomes are visible on the vendor profile.
Confirming receipt before the package arrives, finalising early, releases the coin and removes the dispute path. Vendors who have not earned finalise-early stay escrow-only and the profile says so, so you can read a vendor's standing before you order. Never finalise early on an unproven vendor.
The payment sits at an address requiring two of three signatures, held separately by you, the vendor and the platform. No single party can move it. The vendor sees the order funded and cannot reach the money, and the platform cannot quietly reassign it. That is what makes buying from a stranger workable at all.
Buyer and vendor together is the normal release. Platform and vendor is a dispute decided for the seller, or an automatic release when the timer expires. Platform and buyer is a refund. The platform key alone is useless, which is the property distinguishing this from a market holding funds in a single wallet.
Orders carry an automatic release so an abandoned one does not lock funds forever. It runs whether or not you are paying attention. If a package is late and the timer is approaching, open a dispute rather than waiting politely, because a dispute pauses the clock and an expiry does not.
Order reference and dates first, because everything is checked against the platform record. What the listing promised, quoted rather than summarised. What arrived. What outcome you want, named explicitly and proportionate. Length and tone change nothing, since arbitration compares claims against records rather than judging who argues harder.
A balance held between orders, and anything agreed off the platform where there is no third key and no message record. Moving a conversation to a side channel and settling directly is the shape most losses take, and it is a request worth declining regardless of how reasonable it sounds.
Anubis Market