The refund guarantee

The core promise: an escrowed payment can always come back to you. Not as a support ticket — as a permissionless function on the contract that nobody, including us, can switch off.

How a pending payment resolves

• Normally: the desk settles and delivers, usually within a minute.
• If anything looks wrong: the desk fail-closes — it refunds your payment rather than guessing.
• If the desk is dead: after the timeout you call refund yourself from the paying wallet and the full escrow (proceeds + fee) returns to you.

The dual timeout

Self-refund opens when either threshold passes — currently 30 minutes or a block count (~1 hour worth: 300 blocks on Ethereum, 7,200 on Arc). Two independent clocks, because Arc's timestamps can stall: if one gate sticks, the other still opens. Your order page shows both counters live and enables the button the moment the chain agrees.

Doing it

1. Open your order under Orders (or paste its id into the lookup).
2. Connect the wallet that paid.
3. When the countdown hits zero, press Refund my payment and sign. Done — verify the balance in your wallet.

If a payout can't reach you

USDC transfers to an address can fail (for example, a Circle-blacklisted recipient). Escrow payouts never get stuck on that: the amount is parked in a pull balance that belongs to you on that contract. The Orders page surfaces any non-zero pull balance automatically with a withdraw button; withdrawTo can redirect it to a clean address of yours. As a last-resort backstop for parties who never come back, the desk operator can redirect a parked balance to a clean address of the owed party — and no one else.