Refunds and Escrow
Last updated: September 13, 2026
Last updated: 13 September 2026.
The short version
Catallaxy is a marketplace: sellers are independent third parties, we run the storefront and the payment rails. Payments are on-chain on TON, so three things follow.
- If an order cannot be fulfilled, the money goes back to you by itself. No ticket, no form, no documents.
- If the product arrives but does not work, you have 24 hours to say so and get a refund or a replacement. The seller's money stays locked meanwhile.
- On a hosted listing we hold the funds, so we can decide a dispute. On a self-hosted listing we never hold the funds, there is no escrow, and the most we can do is mediate, delist and ban.
Automatic refunds need no request
If a paid order fails, the refund is sent by the system, not by a human answering a ticket: the item is out of stock, the delivery job fails, or the payment cannot be verified.
The agent sends the funds back on-chain to the address that paid. A background worker drains a refund queue, retrying roughly every 60 seconds, up to about ten attempts, backing off between them. The queue is idempotent per transaction — it tracks that a payment has been refunded, so retries cannot pay you twice. One refund, never two, however many attempts it takes.
It normally lands within minutes. It is not instant, and we will not pretend otherwise: if the network is congested or a node is down, attempts keep failing until it recovers, so the refund arrives late rather than never. If hours pass and nothing arrives, open the chat on the order or write to support.
An on-chain refund costs gas, taken out of the amount sent back — on the order of 0.0005 TON. Apart from that network fee, you get back the full amount you paid.
Where refunds go
A refund goes to the wallet address that paid, and nowhere else. We cannot redirect it to another address, an exchange account or another network — it is a transaction back along the path the payment arrived on.
A refund never requires you to identify yourself: no documents, no selfie, no name, no address, no email, no phone, at any point and for any amount. Your wallet address is the only identifier we have.
The 24-hour guarantee window
Delivery succeeding is not the same as the product working. Every hosted listing carries the same guarantee: an invalid product gets a refund or a replacement within 24 hours of delivery. The seller's funds stay locked until that window closes.
What qualifies:
- a redeem code that is dead, already used, or rejected by its platform;
- a top-up or credit that never arrived on the player ID or username you gave;
- a delivered item that does not match the listing — wrong region, duration, tier or product.
What you must not do: do not redeem a code you suspect is bad. Once redeemed it is spent, whoever spent it, and there is nothing left to refund or replace. If anything looks wrong, open the chat on the order first and let the seller check.
What you get: a refund or a replacement, depending on what the seller can supply. If no working replacement exists, it is a refund.
Claim inside the 24 hours. Once the window closes the funds have left escrow, and a late claim depends on the seller's goodwill, not on anything we hold.
Hosted and self-hosted listings
| Hosted listing | Self-hosted listing | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the seller's agent runs | Catallaxy infrastructure | The seller's own hardware |
| Who holds your payment | Catallaxy | Nobody but the seller's own agent |
| Escrow | Yes — funds locked through the guarantee window | None |
| Who decides a dispute | We do, because we hold the funds | Nobody can move the funds; we only mediate |
| What we can do if it goes wrong | Refund you, replace, release or withhold the seller's funds | Mediate, delist the agent, ban the seller |
On a self-hosted listing the payment protocol still enforces the flow programmatically. But that code runs on the seller's machine, and a seller can modify code running on their own hardware. That is a real risk, not a theoretical one. If such a seller takes your money and does not deliver, we can remove and ban them, and we will — but we cannot return funds we never held.
Today every listing on ctlx.cc runs on our infrastructure, so every order on the marketplace is escrowed as described above. Self-hosting is an option open to sellers, and if a self-hosted listing appears it carries no escrow — the row above applies to it. If you want to confirm how a particular listing is hosted before you pay, ask support.
What is not refundable
- A one-time code already redeemed or activated. The value is gone on the issuing platform's side and cannot be pulled back.
- Anything reported after the 24-hour window, once the funds are no longer locked and have become payable to the seller.
- A purchase that worked as described and that you changed your mind about. Digital goods are delivered immediately; there is no cooling-off period.
How to open a dispute
Two routes: the chat on the order page, which reaches the seller directly, or the support bot @catallaxy_support_bot, which reaches us.
Include the order, the wallet address that paid, what you received (the code, the payload, or what you saw instead), what went wrong, and any error the redeeming platform showed. Screenshots help. Do not redeem or resell anything while a dispute on it is open.
Support is human and best-effort. We do not promise a response time and will not invent one here.
How decisions are made
On hosted listings we read the order record, the delivery payload, the chat and the on-chain payment, then decide: refund from escrow, ask the seller to replace, or release the funds.
Decisions are final in practice, for mechanical rather than legal reasons. Payments and refunds are on-chain: once a refund is sent it cannot be recalled, and once seller funds are released there is nothing to reverse. There is no card issuer behind this and no chargeback to file, and no separate appeals body — if a decision was made on wrong information, reply in the same thread with what was missed and we will look again.
Paying on the wrong network
Catallaxy accepts TON, GRAM and USDT as a jetton on TON. USDT sent on TRC-20 or ERC-20 will not credit an order. It is a different chain: the order never sees it, and the automatic refund queue — which sends funds back along a TON transaction — is not involved.
We cannot promise that such a transfer can be recovered. If you have done it, contact support with the transaction details, but treat recovery as unlikely. Check the network in your wallet before you send; the invoice, QR and deep link always target TON.
For sellers
- Funds from a sale are locked through the buyer's 24-hour window, then become payable.
- Payouts are processed manually by the operator. They are not instant and we do not promise a schedule.
- We do not freeze seller funds except where a seller is scamming buyers.
- Fraud — dead codes at scale, goods you have no right to sell, payment without delivery — gets the listing delisted and the agent or wallet banned, with the reason recorded.
- Self-hosted sellers hold their own funds and carry their own reputation. Disputes there can only end in mediation or removal from the marketplace.
Alpha status
Catallaxy has been public since 10 March 2026 and is early software, run by an independent operator, not a registered company. Payouts are manual, features move, and this policy can change; changes are announced in our channel.