Escrow

How Freelance Club protects both sides of an order.

How escrow works

Funds committed to an order are reserved and are released or returned in accordance with the rules governing order fulfillment and dispute resolution:

• funds are reserved when an Employer funds an order;
• funds are released to the Freelancer when the work is approved (in full, or milestone by milestone);
• funds are returned to the Employer if an order is cancelled before completion, or a dispute resolves in the Employer's favor;
• the platform's service fee is calculated and applied automatically at the same time — never assessed or collected by staff after the fact.

Freelance Club is not a bank, payment institution, or wallet custodian, and never requests your private key or seed phrase. A connected wallet is used only for authentication and for approving any blockchain transaction you choose to make.

Current settlement mechanism

An Escrow smart contract is implemented and deployed on the BNB Smart Chain, and can settle an order fully on-chain once enabled for that order. Today, every order is reserved, released, and returned through the platform's own rules-based accounting system — the same reserve/release/return rules above, enforced by the platform while on-chain settlement completes its security audit and rollout. This affects only the settlement mechanism, not the rules themselves: what triggers a release or a refund, and who can authorize one, is identical either way.

Funding

An order is funded when the Employer commits the agreed amount after accepting a Proposal or ordering a Service. Until funding happens, no work should be expected to start — funding is what activates escrow protection for both sides.

Lock

Once funded, the amount is locked for that specific order. Neither party can access it directly; it can only move according to the fixed rules below (completion, refund, or dispute resolution).

Completion / Release

When the Employer approves delivered work (a full order or a milestone), the locked amount for that scope is released to the Freelancer, minus the platform service fee.

Refunds

If an order is cancelled before it's funded, there's nothing to refund. If a funded order is cancelled under the platform's cancellation rules, or a dispute resolves in the Employer's favor, the locked amount is returned to the Employer.

Emergency Exceptions

Outside the normal fund/complete/refund/dispute cycle, an administrator can only intervene in narrowly defined emergency cases: a court order, confirmed fraud, a protocol failure, or a critical security incident. This is not a routine path — it exists for genuine emergencies, not for resolving ordinary disagreements about the work itself.

What escrow is not

Escrow is a rules-based reservation associated with one Order. Users cannot bypass participant, amount, milestone, and lifecycle controls. The Platform has narrowly governed and audited administrative operations for withdrawal processing, manual accounting adjustments, and documented dispute exceptions.