Frequently asked questions

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.

Fees are tiered by deal value and published in full on our Fees page, along with what is not covered. They run from 1.5% at the smallest deals down to 0.45% above half a million dollars, with a minimum fee of $200 and a minimum deal size of $5,000. Above $2m we quote individually. You will see the exact figure in writing before you commit, and we do not quote privately at a rate that differs from the published schedule.

Split evenly by default. Both sides get the protection, so both sides share the cost. You are free to reassign it between yourselves. Tell us before funding and we will bill it that way. If a deal is funded and then collapses, the work has already been done and the fee is borne by the buyer.

Because the cost of a deal barely moves with its size. Two identity checks, two source-of-funds reviews, wallet screening and setting up a multi-signature address cost the same on a $6,000 deal as on a $60,000 one. Below roughly $5,000 the fee stops being proportionate to the value being protected, and we would be doing you no favours by taking it.

No, but the rate tapers sharply and we quote by negotiation above $2m. A hard cap sounds generous and is usually a sign that no human reviews the deal. A service capping at $50 on a million-dollar transaction is not running identity checks or source-of-funds work on it, because it could not afford to.

No. We charge a disclosed fee for performing a service. We do not take a share of the transaction, we do not lend out or stake funds held in escrow, and we do not earn anything on them while they sit there.

Funds cannot be released without your signature, so a counterparty who vanishes cannot take them. Once the agreed deadline passes you can open a dispute, and the process runs on a published timetable rather than an open-ended one.

The moment a dispute is raised, funds are frozen and both parties receive a case reference and a request for evidence within five minutes. That part is automatic and runs at any hour. Each side then has 48 hours to submit evidence, extendable once. From there we acknowledge within four working hours (and within 24 hours in any case), complete a first review within one working day, and target a decision within five working days, typically three. Our working week is Sunday to Thursday, Kuwait time. Complex cases take longer and we will tell you so rather than let a clock run silently.

Against the written terms both parties accepted at the start, not against what was said afterwards, and not against whoever argues hardest. We review the recorded terms, the evidence each side submits, the on-chain record of what moved and when, and correspondence through our channels. We do not consider side agreements neither party can evidence. The outcome is release, return, a proportionate split, or, where the evidence genuinely does not support a decision, funds staying in escrow with both parties told what would resolve it.

There is an internal appeal to someone who did not make the original decision. Beyond that the route depends on the amount, because arbitration can easily cost more than the sum in dispute: under $25,000 we use documents-only online arbitration or expert determination; between $25,000 and $100,000 the ADGM Courts Small Claims Division, where the fee is 3% capped at $3,000 and includes hearings; above $100,000 a streamlined arbitration producing an internationally enforceable award. The full ladder is on our Complaints page.

That is a separate route from a deal dispute. We acknowledge complaints within one working day and respond substantively within 15 business days, with a status update and an explanation if we are still working on it at four weeks. Nothing takes longer than eight weeks. Complaints are free, always, and we keep the records for ten years.

Both parties together can cancel and return funds to the buyer at any point before release, and the seller can always return funds unilaterally. One party alone cannot take them, which is the entire point of the arrangement.

USDT on Tron and on Ethereum, USDC on Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Ether. That is deliberately narrow. Tron carries most of the stablecoin flow in this region and is the cheapest to move; Bitcoin gives us multi-signature at the protocol level; Ethereum deals are held in a Safe smart account. We will add chains where there is real demand rather than for the sake of a longer list.

Privacy coins cannot be screened, which makes them incompatible with the checks we are required to run, and they have also been delisted almost everywhere. We also decline rebasing and fee-on-transfer tokens: their balances change after funding, so the amount that arrives in escrow is not the amount that leaves it, which breaks the arithmetic escrow depends on.

Yes. KWD alongside USD, AED, BHD and SAR. Worth saying explicitly, because of the five largest platforms serving this region only one names KWD anywhere in its customer-facing copy. Kuwaiti Dinar is quoted to three decimal places, as it should be.

Yes. Enquiries, deal terms and dispute correspondence can all be handled in Arabic or English, and our written terms are available in both. The site itself is English-first with Arabic in progress. We would rather ship the language support before advertising it than the other way round.

The structure is a settled one in Islamic finance: agency for a disclosed fee (wakālah bi-l-ujrah) with the funds held in trust (amānah), which is the arrangement AAOIFI’s standards describe. We charge a fixed fee for work performed, take no share of the transaction, and earn nothing on funds while we hold them. Whether a particular digital asset is itself permissible is a separate and genuinely contested question among scholars. The OIC Fiqh Academy declined to rule on it in 2019 and prominent scholars disagree. That question is for your own scholar, not for us. We do not describe this service as certified, because it has not been reviewed. See our Sharia page.

Message us on WhatsApp or send an enquiry with the deal outline: asset, amount, both parties, and the delivery terms you have in mind. We will confirm whether we can act and what it will cost before you commit to anything.