erenberke

Stripe puts it nicely here!

"Escrow has a precise legal definition, and Stripe doesn’t provide escrow services or support escrow accounts. However, you can control payout timing through manual payouts, which allow you to delay payouts to certain accounts. When using manual payouts, you must pay out funds within the time frame for the business’s country.

Use delayed payouts when a delivery is delayed or when you think you have a possibility of a refund."

Stripe processes the payment as a direct charge on the seller's connected Stripe account. Seller proceeds stay in that Stripe balance with payouts set to manual. They never pass through Stoa's bank account or operating balance sheet.

After the buyer accepts/inspects the hardware, we then trigger a payout from the seller's Stripe balance to their bank.

I used the term "escrow" too loosely above to make an analogy. Hope this clarifies the confusion. There is also Stripe documentation about the feature we are using here: https://docs.stripe.com/connect/manual-payouts.

I just used "escrow" to make the process relatable, but we are not technically escrowing it under Stoa. We use Stripe's services to control payment releases upon shipment / inspection. Hopefully didn't cause confusion

merhaba!

we do! any configuration can be sent as an RFQ and dealers will respond with their inventory

The terms are defined in the sales agreements on the platform. Both parties abide by the terms throughout the transaction. We do not release any payment to the sellers until the buyer certifies that they have done the inspection and they are satisfied with the purchase. Throughout the settlement steps, we ask for evidence from both parties.

Contract is essentially pre-defined on the platform, and the parties need to agree with it to trade on Stoa. Establishes mutual trust among both parties.

if wrong documentation is produced, buyers have the right to dispute / return the equipment for a preset period of time. we get the sellers to certify the verifications they upload.

Wouldn't really say like ebay. our transactions are binding and more client driven (clients put the requests instead of stale dealer listings).

on ebay, the dealers always have the right to just cancel your order. we heard this caused a lot of problems for different vendors.

Great question. We don’t treat “used” as one bucket. Before the RFQ goes out, the buyer says what logs and tests they need. If the seller can’t provide usage history, that’s stated in the quote rather than inferred. The market then prices that difference. Hardware with better records and more thorough testing should attract higher bids.

Website includes some of the most liquid cards, but we have many more configs in the actual marketplace.

Basis risk is also a big part of futures markets, how much does spot price differ from forward pricing and why. For physical GPUs, theory would expect a downward sloping forward curve due to the depreciation factor, but from what we have seen recently, sometimes not the case!

Yes, those types of differences across different providers is what the finance world calls basis risk. As more and more transactions take place, we hope to bring transparency into how different components/specs can change pricing, and make them tradable too.

We have AMD chips too, especially MI350X has been in high demand.

Yep, we currently only transact within the US in the marketplace. We handle end user disclosure type checks on the platform. For any international deals, we still support them via our over-the-counter brokerage arm today.

Those work with rental agreements on compute, we directly transact the hardware itself. Instead of per hr pricing, we do physical unit prices. We help with the shipment and clearing process too.

The market is so new and growing that we sometimes end up working together with competitors to satisfy some of the requests. Would be great to know who it is!

We actually had many rental marketplaces that asked to work with us and validated the need for a hardware marketplace.

We already support these!

We ask any seller to post the condition and testing reports for the hardware they sell, so there is no info asymmetry. As long as there is a willing buyer and a willing seller at the conditions specified, transaction goes through! We deal with A100s all the time.

Nice thing about these chips is that they have built in software that allows you to see the condition. The secondary market also supports the circular economy, most of these servers are proving to be useful longer than what the market initially thought. There is always a case to go with used equipment instead of new ones.

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.

glad you like it! we aggregate de-identified pricing from transactions we observe, and whenever you create a quote, you will see an indicative range of what we think your config is worth. This can deviate from the price you get based on the liquidity in the market, but from our experience, it has been super helpful especially for end users.

Anyone we onboard to the marketplace goes through strict know-your-business checks. We never release any payment to the sellers before a transaction is inspected and verified by the buyer, essentially like an escrow service but for free (instead of around 7% at escrow.com).

We do both! Solving for the forward curve has very interesting applications in the GPU market, as depreciation is a big factor.

We have credit limits/margins in place to be posted for any forward trades which helps with the default risk, similar to other commodity markets. Users can enter the delivery timing details as they create a request, and dealers will price accordingly.

Most of the hardware has super long wait times right now (16-24 weeks), and there is no market structure today that allows to price the differential between a spot, immediately available B300 server vs one with 16-24 week lead time. Our marketplace allows to observe that.

Our primary focus is on trading the physical hardware, most of the marketplaces we see are rental focused. Our thesis is as open source models become stronger and stronger, owning your own hardware will become more prevalent

For now, we are focusing on institutions, since most of this hardware has strict export controls. We deal with all sizes though, we can do a single card to 1024 servers. Can always reach out to us to see if a specific request would fit in the marketplace or not