You expect escrow to be a neutral third party

What escrow genuinely does

It fixes the oldest problem in remote trade. One side has to move first, and whoever moves first can be robbed. Putting the funds somewhere neither party can unilaterally take them removes the incentive to grab and run. That is real and it works, and it is why escrow exists on every market of this kind.

It also creates the record that a dispute is decided from. Once funds are committed to an order, the order has a timeline, and a timeline is something an arbiter can read. That mechanism is described in how a dispute is actually decided.

What it is not

• Not independent. The operator holds the keys and the database.
• Not insured. Nothing stands behind the funds if the platform stops.
• Not permanent. Escrow ends when the order closes, whether by release, by auto release or by a decision.
• Not a quality guarantee. It governs whether funds move, not whether you liked what arrived.

The auto release detail people miss

Escrow has a clock. If nothing happens for long enough, funds release on their own. That is deliberate, because otherwise every abandoned order would sit open forever. It also means an order left alone eventually resolves in the vendor's favour by default. Knowing when your clock runs out is worth more than knowing the policy in the abstract.

Multisig, honestly

Multisig splits the release key between buyer, vendor and platform, so any two can move funds. It genuinely reduces one risk, which is the platform walking off with everything at once. It does not remove the platform from disputes, since the platform is still the third key and still the arbiter, and it does not help with a vendor who never ships.

It also costs something in practice. It is fiddlier, fewer vendors offer it, and it fails in ways that need you to actually understand what you are doing. Whether that trade is worth it is a judgement and this board is not going to pretend otherwise.

The rule that follows from all of it

One more thing people misread. Escrow is not a quality inspection and nobody at the platform sees what was sent. A dispute over whether goods matched a description is decided from a thread and a timeline like any other, which is a much thinner basis than buyers expect when they imagine somebody adjudicating the actual thing.

Escrow protects the order, for the duration of the order. Before you commit and after it closes, you are in the position described in a balance is safe, which is to say you are not protected by anything. Time spent outside an open order is the exposed part of the whole process, and shortening it is the single most useful thing you can do with this information.