What happens to your money
Payments arrive at an address this venue controls and are recorded against the sale that earned them. The seller's share is sent on afterwards — not instantly, and not within a fixed time. Money behind an open bid is held here too, and belongs to the bidder until somebody takes them up on it. That is custody, and it is a consequence of the chain: Zcash has no contracts, and atomic asset swaps need ZIP 228, which is still a draft.
A bid is paid for before anyone else can see it, which is what stops a bid nobody intends to honour from taking an item off the market. Until a holder accepts it, that money is still the bidder's: withdrawing returns it, less the network fee it costs to send. It is not owed to anyone here, so it is counted apart from the payouts above.
Why it works this way
Zcash has no smart contracts. A trade where buyer and seller each sign their own half, with neither able to take without giving, needs ZIP 228 — asset swaps — which is still a draft with no activation date. Until it exists, somebody has to hold the payment between the moment it arrives and the moment the seller is paid. Here that is ZecBit. The item moves as soon as the payment confirms; the seller's money moves when we send it, which is a person doing it rather than a rule enforcing it.
A venue claiming otherwise on Zcash today is either using a different mechanism it has not described, or is not being straight about it.
What this does not cover
- Ownership itself. Until ZSA activates on mainnet, holding an item means holding a commitment in ZecBit's allocation record, not a shielded asset in your wallet. That record is published so a move nobody authorised is detectable — detectable, not impossible.
- Creator royalties. They are applied at settlement here, not by consensus. A shielded transfer between two wallets pays none and is invisible to us.
- Anything sent without its memo tag. A shielded payment carries no sender, so a payment we cannot match is a payment we cannot return on our own.
The day ZIP 228 activates, buyer and seller sign their own legs of the trade and nothing passes through this venue at all. Holding the money is a consequence of what the chain cannot do yet, not a business model — and it stops the moment it stops being necessary.
