Trust
How the money moves: XMR, BTC, and escrow
Payment is where a market either keeps its promises or spends them. Here is the mechanism, in the order the money actually travels, and the three rules that keep it from traveling somewhere you did not mean.
The currencies
BlackOps launched in 2024 on Monero alone, and Monero is still the default the market leads with. XMR hides the sender, the receiver, and the amount from anyone reading the public ledger, which for a market is the difference between a receipt and a rumor.
Bitcoin was added alongside it as the market grew, for buyers who already hold BTC. Same escrow behind it, same order flow. The practical difference is on your side: a Bitcoin deposit is visible on a public chain from the moment it leaves your wallet, so the usual hygiene applies. Spend from a wallet that does not also hold your long-term balance, and do not make the deposit address traceable back to an exchange account you KYC'd last year, because on Bitcoin, that chain is readable.
The escrow, in one paragraph
Each order gets its own sub-address, and the funds for that order sit in a 2-of-3 multisig: three keys, two needed to move the money. You hold one, the vendor holds one, the market holds one. The vendor cannot ship and run, you cannot pay and refuse, and the market cannot keep what is not disputed. When you confirm delivery, or the release timer does its job, the money moves. When you open a dispute, the third key is what actually decides.
The design pays off in the boring way: no consolidated pile to seize or steal, no single balance that makes the market worth breaking into, and a compromise that costs one order instead of a vault. It is not a guarantee. It is the difference between a lock and a bolt.
The flow, start to finish
You place the order. The order page shows you the deposit address and the amount, in the currency you chose.
You send to that address, and only that address, the amount shown on that page. The address is per order. Copying a deposit address from an old order, a screenshot, or a message is how money ends up in the wrong escrow.
The market sees the confirmations, the vendor sees the order, the vendor ships. Tracking comes through the order page and the PGP channel, not through chat.
You receive it, you confirm, the escrow releases. Or the timer releases it for you, which is the part of the system that works even when you do not.
The dispute window closes. After that, the market's role in the transaction is over, and so is its ability to help.
Note Fees are taken off the top of the sale and they change. The current figure lives on the market's own fee page, inside the market, because it is market data and it moves. A directory that prints the fee is a directory that is already out of date.
Three rules that cover most of the losses
- Fund only the address on the order page, checked against the page, in the moment. A deposit address is a one-time key, and reusing one is a gift to whoever reads the chain.
- No deals in chat. The moment a vendor wants the payment to move to a private address or a "better rate" on another platform, the escrow you just paid for has left the room.
- No early release for a discount. Releasing before you hold the item is trading a certain thing for a promise, and the promise is the part that does not arrive.
Where to read the numbers
Balances, rates, fees, volume: take all of it from the order page inside the market and nowhere else. Those figures move while you read them, so any copy of them on a clearnet page is a screenshot of a moment that has passed, no matter how recent it claims to be. If a directory quotes you a fee or a rate for this market, it is quoting yesterday, and a rate quoted for a coin you are about to send is the wrong kind of wrong.