Most of the help center talks about the Marketplace, where you trade with strangers. The private escrow is the other way in: you and someone you already know (a friend, a client, a supplier, someone from a group) agree on a price, and iEscrow holds the crypto so that nobody has to hand over first. The trade is not listed anywhere.
How to create one
- 1Go to Create escrow and choose Private ("I already have the counterparty").
- 2Pick what you are trading: crypto for a bank transfer or local payment method, crypto for crypto (even on different networks), or crypto for a product or a service, with or without milestones.
- 3Enter the amount, the rate you agreed on, and your counterparty's iEscrow username. They need an account; if they do not have one, creating it takes a minute and the request will be waiting for them.
- 4Send it. Your counterparty sees the request with the terms, the amount and what each side will receive, and can accept, reject or request changes (you edit and resend).
What happens next
- The request expires in 24 hours if nobody accepts it. It is cancelled automatically and nothing is locked.
- Once accepted, the trade follows the same order as any trade on iEscrow: the crypto is locked first, the other side pays or delivers, the one who locked confirms, the crypto is released. The time windows are the same (see Trade timers).
- Each private escrow brings two people into iEscrow. Only one of them needs to know the platform beforehand.
A private escrow protects the order of the trade, not the deal itself. Agree the price and the conditions before creating it, and never pay outside the platform "to make it faster": a transfer sent outside the escrow almost never comes back.