🔗 Multisig Wallets Guide

Standard escrow, as covered in the escrow guide, still leaves one structural weakness: the market itself holds the funds outright and could theoretically walk away with everyone's balance at once, the way Empire Market did. Multisignature (multisig) escrow closes that specific gap by requiring two of three parties — buyer, vendor, and market — to sign before any release, so the market alone physically cannot move the money even if it wanted to; a market operator turning malicious or getting seized doesn't hand them the escrow balance the way plain custodial escrow would. In a 2-of-3 setup, buyer and vendor can complete a clean transaction between themselves with no market signature needed at all, and only bring the market in as the tie-breaking mediator when a dispute actually happens — which also means the market has less to gain from disputes it doesn't need to resolve honestly, since it was never holding the funds to begin with.

Enable it under Account Settings → Payment → Enable Multisig, and have a Bitcoin wallet that actually supports multisig ready beforehand — Electrum handles this well and is the option most guides (this one included) assume. Each order gets its own unique multisig address, derived fresh from the buyer's, vendor's, and market's public keys — it is not a shared or reused address, which matters because reuse would let an outside observer link every multisig order on the platform to the same underlying key set. Deposit the exact order total to that address and wait for confirmation before considering the order funded; sending slightly less than the listed price is a common first-timer mistake that stalls the order while everyone waits to figure out where the shortfall went.

Finalizing works by signature, not by a click on a "release funds" button: you sign the release transaction with your private key, the vendor co-signs with theirs, and once two of the three required signatures exist, the transaction is valid and the funds move — no further approval needed from the third party. A dispute follows the same logic in reverse: you sign a refund transaction, and the moderator co-signs it only after reviewing the evidence both sides submitted, at which point their signature plus yours meets the 2-of-3 threshold. The one rule that can't bend: you never share your private key, full stop, not with the market, not with support, not with anyone claiming to need it to "help" — you only ever share the signed transaction itself. A private key request from anyone is a scam attempt on its face, since legitimate multisig never requires it. The trade-off for all this is complexity: multisig is measurably more fiddly to use than standard escrow, in exchange for fund security that standard escrow structurally cannot match.