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I’m very curious about how you’re fending off fraud— just wondering about how a lot of dark web transactions supposedly have escrow, but people waive it and then get burned. Do you have anything beyond KYC/escrow?

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We use Stripe Connect to transfer the funds, and it is not a waivable process. In addition to KYC documentation, the team personally meets with any participant we onboard to the marketplace. We also have the ability to manually intervene in transactions if need be, but so far we have not had any transaction issues. It almost reminds me of how people were super skeptical of Uber and Airbnb when they first launched, but human trust goes a long way, sometimes further than we originally anticipate.

One thing that guides how we think about this is: we will never ask you to make the payment before you feel comfortable with the counterparty you are dealing with.

I agree with you that most humans are trustworthy, but fraudulent actors will build trust with counterparties on your marketplace and then abscond. "Personally meeting with them" does not prevent a "long firm" from skipping town with the proceeds from a $6m order later.

I think what you guys are building is awesome, just gotta be really really careful with fraud and trust when building a marketplace in particular.

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