100%
Your signature is one of the three
Escrow funds sit in a 2-of-3 multi-signature address. You hold a key, your counterparty holds a key, we hold a key. Any two of you move the money, and every route to releasing it runs through one of the two of you.
That is arithmetic rather than a promise, which is the point. You can read the address and its signing policy on the public ledger before you send anything, and confirm it for yourself.
Four things you can
check for yourself
Every one of them is verifiable somewhere other than this website.
Licensed
Central Bank of Bahrain, Category 2.
Screening
Every wallet, every deal, via Crystal Intelligence.
Audited
SOC 2 Type II by Praetorian Security, March 2026.
Five steps, start to settled
What happens, in order, and who does what at each stage.
-
Both parties agree the terms
Buyer and seller set the asset, amount, delivery conditions and deadline. We record the agreed terms and issue a reference both sides can quote.
-
We verify both sides
Identity and source-of-funds checks on both parties, plus on-chain screening of the wallets involved before anything is funded.
-
Buyer funds the escrow
Funds move into a multi-signature address that no single party, including us, can move alone. The address is verifiable on-chain before you send.
-
Seller delivers
The seller performs. The buyer confirms delivery against the terms recorded in step one, not against anything agreed verbally afterwards.
-
Funds release
On buyer approval the escrow releases to the seller. If there is a disagreement, the dispute process starts instead, on a published clock.
Deals where timing
is the whole problem
If delivery and payment cannot happen at the same instant,
someone has to go first. That is the gap we close.
OTC and P2P trades
Large trades between two parties who have no reason to trust each other. The most common reason people call us.
Business settlements
Cross-border payments between companies where one side delivers before the other pays, and neither wants to go first.
Asset and equity sales
Domains, codebases, company stakes, equipment: anything where delivery and payment do not happen at the same instant.
Milestone contracts
Long projects paid in stages. Funds are committed up front so the contractor can start, and released as each stage is accepted.
Private sales between individuals
Vehicles, property deposits, high-value goods. Both parties want proof the money exists before anything changes hands.
Remittance-linked deals
Kuwait has a large expatriate population moving value home. Escrow protects the leg of the transaction that leaves the banking system.
The first twelve months
A trailing twelve-month record for a desk working the $5,000 to $500,000 band. Every figure here is one we can evidence on request.
-
Every figure is evidenced
Each number here traces to settled deals we can show a counterparty on request. On a page whose whole purpose is trust, that is the only kind worth publishing.
-
Verifiable where it counts most
Deal-level facts (the escrow address, its balance, its signing policy) live on the public ledger, where you can read them yourself rather than take our word for the summary.
$0M
Settled through escrow
0
Deals completed
0
Countries served
0min
Average release time
The whole schedule, in text, on this page
Tiered by deal value, split evenly between buyer and seller unless you agree otherwise. No private rates, and no surprises at release.
Of the five largest crypto platforms serving the Gulf, one publishes a live fee table. Another publishes its schedule as an image inside a blog post. A fee you cannot read before you commit is not a published fee.
Work out your fee
Indicative. The exact figure is confirmed in writing before you commit.
…
Minimum deal $5,000 · minimum fee $200.
Check it on the public ledger
The strongest security claim is one you can confirm without asking us. Three of ours sit on a public blockchain, open to you the moment your deal is created.
The escrow address
Issued and shown to both parties before funding.
Its signing policy
How many signatures are required to move funds, and whose.
Every movement
In and out, permanently, whether or not we are still here.
A dispute clock, published
Of every comparable platform we reviewed, only one publishes hard timings and only one publishes its live queue. Everyone else offers “we will be in touch”.
5 min
Funds frozen, case opened. Automatic, any hour
4h
Acknowledged by a named person
1 day
First review, both sides' evidence read
5 days
Decision issued, typically 3
If we miss a published target, the escrow fee for that deal is waived. We would rather pay for a missed clock than quietly redefine it. Working hours are Sunday–Thursday, Kuwait time, with calendar backstops that hold over the weekend.
A fee for a service, not a share of your money
Escrow is wakālah bi-l-ujrah, agency for a disclosed fee, with the funds held as amānah, a trust.
- A fixed fee, disclosed before you commit and calculated on the deal value.
- Funds held as a trust: kept whole, per deal, and returned or released intact.
- Held separately from company money, and never lent, staked or pooled.
- Our revenue is the fee alone. We take no share of your transaction and pay no returns.
How far we take the claim
We describe the structure, because the structure is what a scholar would examine. We stop short of calling it “Sharia-certified”, which is a statement only a scholar can make. If a recognised one reviews this, we will name them and publish exactly what they reviewed.
The region's first Shariah-certified crypto licensee has since removed all Sharia positioning from its site. We would rather occupy that ground carefully than loudly.
The things people actually ask
Funds are held in a multi-signature address that requires two of three signatures to move. You hold one key, the seller holds one, and we hold one. We cannot release funds to ourselves under any combination of signatures. The arithmetic does not permit it. You can verify the address and its signing policy on the public ledger before you send anything.
Because we hold only one of three keys, a shutdown does not strand your funds. You and your counterparty together hold the two signatures needed to move them, and you can do so without us. On Tron and on Ethereum the signer set can be rotated without the funds ever moving; on Bitcoin the two remaining keyholders sweep to a new address.
Yes, and you should. The address is generated and shown to both parties before funding, and it is an ordinary address you can look up on any block explorer. Confirm the balance and the signing policy yourself. Always check the address through a channel you started, not one sent to you.
One lost key is survivable: the remaining two signatures still move the funds, so the deal completes normally. Two lost keys is not: the funds are permanently unreachable by anyone, including us. We would rather say that plainly than imply a rescue we cannot perform. Any service that can recover from two lost keys was never actually constrained by the third.
Not because it is more secure; a good custodian is excellent at security. Because it is verifiable. "We cannot move your funds alone" is something you can check on a block explorer in thirty seconds. With a custody provider it is a promise about somebody else’s software that you have to take on trust.
The funds sit at an on-chain address controlled by the three keys, not in an account belonging to us or to anyone else. There is no third-party custodian, and that is the design rather than a gap: handing our key to a custody provider would rebuild the single point of control the arrangement exists to remove. Our key lives on a dedicated hardware signer that has never been connected to a network, and moving it requires two of our people, not one. On Bitcoin we use Nunchuk, on Ethereum a Safe smart account, and on Tron the chain’s own multi-signature permissions.
Yes, and the detail is more interesting than “Kuwait banned crypto”. CMA Circular No. (10) of 2023 bans virtual assets as a payment instrument and as an investment, and bars granting anyone in Kuwait a licence to provide virtual asset services, so no Kuwaiti licence exists for us or for anyone else to hold. But that circular is addressed to Kuwaiti financial institutions and DNFBPs, not to you and not to us, and it expressly contemplates transactions “executed outside the State of Kuwait with the knowledge of clients”. What it requires for those is that clients be constantly informed of the risks: a disclosure duty, not a prohibition on the client. We serve Kuwaiti residents cross-border under our Bahraini licence, we claim no Kuwaiti authorisation, and we hold ourselves to that disclosure standard even though it binds Kuwaiti institutions rather than us. Practically: your contract is with a Bahraini company, Bahraini law governs it, and your recourse runs through Bahrain. Our regulatory status page sets that out in full, including the recourse you do not have.
Yes. Kafil W.L.L. holds a Category 2 Crypto-Asset Services Company Licence from the Central Bank of Bahrain, granted under Volume 6 of the CBB Rulebook. Category 2 is the lowest category that carries crypto-asset custody, which is the permission escrow actually needs. Category 1 stops short of it, and Categories 3 and 4 would add principal trading and exchange operation, permissions we do not want and would then be supervised against. Worth knowing before you check: our register entry shows four permitted activities, and we carry on exactly one of them, custody. We do not trade for you, manage anything for you, or advise you on what to buy. One quirk of the Bahraini regime: the CBB does not issue per-licence reference numbers at all, unlike Dubai’s VARA or ADGM. There is no number to quote, and anyone showing you a ‘CBB licence number’ is showing you something they invented. Verification is by entity name in the CBB Licensing Directory, which also returns our permitted activities, our approved persons and our controllers.
Both parties complete identity verification and source-of-funds checks before any deal is funded, and every wallet involved is screened against sanctions and illicit-finance databases. Verification is required on every deal regardless of size. The international standard sets the threshold for virtual asset services at around USD 1,000, which is well below our minimum deal size, so in practice there is no deal we do not verify. We retain those records for five years after the relationship ends.
It is the international requirement that identifying information about the sender and recipient travels with a transfer. Above roughly USD 1,000 it means your verified name, your wallet identifier and one further identifier (an address, national ID, or date and place of birth) accompany the transfer, along with the beneficiary’s name and wallet. Dubai applies a lower floor of AED 3,500 and Bahrain applies none at all, meaning every transfer. Since our minimum deal size is well above all of these, assume it applies to your deal.
No, and no one else may either. Where a business suspects money laundering or terrorist financing it must report to the financial intelligence unit, and disclosing that a report has been made is itself a criminal offence in every jurisdiction we could operate from. In the UAE it carries at least six months’ imprisonment and a fine. If we cannot proceed with a deal we may only be able to tell you that we cannot act.
We cannot act where comprehensive sanctions apply, currently Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and the Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, nor for any sanctioned individual or entity regardless of where they are. Deals touching jurisdictions on the FATF list for increased monitoring attract enhanced checks rather than an automatic refusal. The current list and the basis for it are on our Restricted Jurisdictions page, and we check at verification, before funding, not afterwards.
Tell us about the deal
Asset, amount, both parties, delivery terms. We will confirm whether we can act and exactly what it costs before you commit to anything.