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Sellers

Sellers are mainly concerned with receiving the funds from the escrow, but they might also need a way to refund the buyers if necessary.

Receiving payments​

The way Ethereum smart contracts work is that the funds aren't automatically sent out once the escrow period ends. Someone has to execute that transaction from a wallet and pay for its gas costs. Unicrow allows anyone to call the claim function because the smart contract sends the funds only to the seller (and optionally fees to a marketplace and/or an arbitrator).

That means there are a couple of ways sellers can set things up to receive the funds:

  1. To their own web3 wallet, giving themselves full custody and ability to perform the necessary actions like claim and refund
  2. To a custodial fiat off-ramp. In this case, the refunds would have to be done by an arbitrator. Claims can be done either by the seller from another web3 wallet or by the marketplace operator.

To own wallet​

If you want to keep the funds on-chain in your own custody, install a web3 wallet. A marketplace that integrates Unicrow will probably require you to provide your address. Simply copy it from the wallet and paste it to the marketplace settings.

Receving funds to your own wallet not only keeps the money under your control, but allows you to use all the features of Unicrow escrow, e.g. you can directly refund the buyers if necessary, or claim the released escrows yourself if the marketplace operator doesn't provide such a service.

See an example how to copy address from MetaMask wallet on the right.

To a fiat off-ramp​

If you want to convert the received funds to fiat (e.g. USD or EUR) to send them to your bank account, you can set up a deposit address from e.g. your exchange as a seller address. However, you must be careful with this approach, which has a few assumptions and drawbacks:

  • Make sure the exchange can indeed receive the expected tokens on Arbitrum One
  • If you intend to accept multiple tokens to the same address, you need to make sure the exchange gives you the same address for all the tokens
  • You will not be able to perform actions such as refund or claim. So this approach will work only if you agree with the arbitrator to do refunds and if you or the marketplace operator "claims" the funds from the escrow after the challenge period ends from another wallet

Below example screenshots of how to get a deposit address from Kraken.

Claiming and refunding​

The actual user experience might differ based on how the platform you're interacting with integrates Unicrow, but we'll use an example of claiming and refunding via Unicrow's web3 app

Claim​

Once the challenge period (or escrow period) ends, the payment can be claimed. Again, the claim doesn't necessarily have to be called by the seller. That's because whoever calls it, the smart contract ensures that only the seller receives the funds, and the marketplace and/or the arbitrator receive their fees.

Refund​

Seller can refund the payment at any time. All fees are waived in this case, the buyer receives the refund in full.