Escrow

A neutral third party or smart contract that holds funds or assets until both sides meet the agreed terms, then releases them, cutting counterparty risk.

NTNamefi TeamAuthorVZVictor ZhouEditorJune 30, 2025

glossary

Escrow is a financial arrangement where a neutral third party holds assets during a transaction until all conditions are met, protecting both buyer and seller. Traditional domain escrow services like Escrow.com charge fees and require trust in the service provider.

What Namefi is and isn't

Namefi is an ICANN-accredited registrar and a domain tokenization platform. Namefi is not an escrow service — including a domain escrow service — and is not a wallet provider, exchange, broker, or money services business.

Namefi is not a party to secondary sales of tokenized domains. Those settle directly between buyer and seller through public marketplace contracts such as Seaport, in a single transaction that either completes in full or reverts. Namefi does not hold, release, or refund the funds in those trades at any point, and does not make payouts to sellers. Namefi does not operate or control Ethereum or any other public blockchain.

When you register or renew a domain, you are paying Namefi for that service, and card payments are processed by Stripe or another third-party payment provider Namefi works with. That is a purchase of Namefi's own services, not funds held for another party.

Onchain settlement removes the need for anyone to hold funds in the middle. It also shifts risk to your wallet security, the address you send to, and the marketplace contract you use — once a transaction confirms there is no chargeback and no dispute process.

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Contributors

Namefi Team

Namefi Team • Namefi

Author

Namefi is a collective of engineers, designers, and operators who obsess over building tools that make managing your onchain domain names effortless.

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Victor Zhou

Founder & Standards Editor • Namefi

Editor

Victor Zhou is a technology founder and standards editor focused on digital identity and trust. He founded Namefi, edits Ethereum Improvement Proposals, and previously led smart-contract architecture work at Google Labs.

His work sits at the intersection of naming, ownership, and the systems people use to establish identity online. That perspective makes him especially interested in the way names move between personal meaning, public recognition, and digital infrastructure.

For Namefi, Victor edits and writes about domains as durable digital identity: how names become ownable onchain assets, how tokenization changes custody and trust, and what naming can learn from the systems people use to establish identity online.

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