Awazon Market escrow, three keys and two signatures
The market describes its escrow as 2 of 3 multisig. That phrase has a precise meaning, and the useful part of it is the number of keys the market alone cannot move.
The three keys
- Buyer key. Yours. Held by the account you logged into, which means in practice it is held by the market’s session for you and disappears with your password.
- Vendor key. Held by whoever sold the item.
- Market key. Held by the people running the storefront.
Two of the three are required to sign a spend. A routine release is you plus the market, or in a quiet order the vendor plus the market. A dispute is the market plus whichever side it agrees with. The case worth thinking about is the one where the market and one party agree to move coins and you did not.
Where the trust actually sits
Multisig makes unilateral theft by the operator more expensive and less quiet. It does not make it impossible, because one of the three keys still sits in their pocket, and a market that intends to walk can do it with any two of them. Anyone describing multisig as the thing that makes a custodial market trustless has read the word too literally.
The protection is real but it is a protection against a particular failure. It is weakest exactly where a buyer is most likely to be alone in an argument, and strongest in the ordinary case where nobody particularly wants to bother.
A separate fact worth having in mind: your balance inside the storefront is a record in their database. What the multisig script protects is the value that has not yet been released, not an accounting number you are reading on screen.
The order, start to finish
- You pay a deposit address. The coins become spendable for the escrow step once the network has put enough confirmations behind the transaction, and that wait is described on the payments page.
- The order enters the escrow script and shows up in your orders list with a status attached.
- The vendor ships and, on this market, may mark some orders eligible for early finalize, which lets a buyer release funds before delivery is confirmed. It exists to let buyers build a history with a vendor they have not used before.
- On delivery you finalize and two signatures move the coins.
- If something went wrong you open a dispute instead, and the outcome rests on what you both left in the order’s message log.
What an arbitrator can and cannot do
A decision moves coins from the escrow script to one side or the other. It cannot return a package that was opened in transit, cannot reconstruct a photo you did not take at the moment you unpacked, and cannot do anything at all about a product that was legal where you live and is not where you are standing. A dispute opened because you changed your mind is not a dispute about the vendor’s conduct.
The order’s message thread is the evidence. A complaint filed with a screenshot of a delivery tracking number and one line of prose is a weaker document than a thread that shows when you asked and when the vendor answered, and it is the timestamps in that thread that do most of the work.
Questions
- What does 2 of 3 multisig mean in one sentence?
Three people hold a key and any two of them can sign a payment out of the escrow address, so no single holder can move the coins and no pair can be overruled by the third without the other two agreeing on where the coins go.
- What is direct deal on Awazon Market?
A payout mode in which a trusted vendor is paid straight to their own wallet when an order is finalized, skipping the escrow step on that order. It is offered by request to selected vendors rather than switched on for everyone, so for most buyers it is a detail in a vendor’s profile and not a setting they will ever touch.
- Can the market move my money by itself?
Not without one of the two other keys. It can, and has been known to, decide which of those two combinations signs a transfer.
- Does multisig protect a balance I leave in my account?
No. It governs funds still sitting in an escrow script between payment and release. A balance you parked is a ledger entry on their side.
- What is early finalize good for?
Getting an order out of escrow so the vendor is paid and the history shows the deal. It is a trust building device and it hands your leverage to the vendor earlier, which is the reason to use it on a small first order and not on the largest order you have ever placed.