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Escrow.com doesn't take crypto: what to use when one side pays in USDT or BTC

Traditional escrow holds fiat and settles by wire. When the payment itself is crypto, you need an escrow that holds crypto, has a dispute process, and does not ask you to trust a person.

Escrow.com and the services built like it hold fiat: you wire dollars, they hold dollars, they wire dollars out. Their own FAQ says they do not accept cryptocurrency. So when a deal is paid in USDT or bitcoin, the question becomes: what holds the crypto while the other side delivers? There are three kinds of answers, and they are not interchangeable.

The three kinds of crypto escrow

The escrow inside an exchange
Binance, Bybit, OKX P2P. Good for buying or selling crypto against their listings. Not built for a private deal you already agreed with a specific person, nor for goods, services or milestones.
Smart-contract (non-custodial) escrow
Code holds the coins. Nobody can run off with them, which is the strength. The weakness: code cannot read a shipping document or a receipt, so a dispute still needs a human or an oracle, and the fiat side of a deal does not exist on-chain. See Custodial or smart-contract escrow: what each can and cannot do when the deal goes wrong.
Custodial escrow with an arbiter
A platform holds the crypto under a written trade, releases on the agreed condition, and an arbiter decides disputes with the reason in writing. This is what iEscrow is: crypto held in escrow for P2P trades, goods, services with milestones, and private business rooms between two companies.

What to check in any of them

  • Is the crypto locked before the other side has to deliver or pay? If not, it is not escrow.
  • Who decides a dispute, with what evidence, and do you get the reason?
  • Can you do a deal with the specific person or company you already found, or only against public listings?
  • Can the deal have milestones and a written description of what "delivered" means?
  • Does the service say plainly who holds the funds? A custodial platform that says so is being honest; one that claims nobody controls the funds while holding your deposit is not.
What iEscrow does not do: hold fiat. If the deal is dollars for dollars, a fiat escrow is the right tool. If one leg is crypto, that leg is what needs holding, and that is what we hold.
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