Held until you confirm receipt.
Escrow holds your money between paying and receiving. Nexus runs standard 2 of 3 multisig.
You fund the order, the vendor ships, you confirm receipt, and the coin releases. If you never confirm, the order auto-finalises after a few days so a vendor is not left waiting on an absent buyer. Disputes route through moderators who read signed evidence from both sides.
Confirming receipt before the package arrives, finalising early, releases the coin to the vendor and removes the dispute path. New vendors are locked out of finalise-early until they have run clean orders, and the profile shows their standing. Never finalise early on an unproven vendor.
The payment sits at an address requiring two of three signatures to move, held separately by you, the vendor and the market. No single party can take it. The vendor can see the order is funded and cannot reach the money, and the market cannot quietly reassign it. That structure is the reason somebody who has never met you is willing to ship first.
A balance held on the market outside an open order, which is in no contract at all. And anything agreed off the platform, where there is no third key, no message record and nothing to arbitrate. Moving a conversation to a side channel and settling directly is the shape most losses take.
Open one instead of confirming when a package does not arrive or arrives wrong. Keep the submission short and factual, with the order reference and the dates first, because arbitration compares two accounts against what the market recorded rather than judging who argues more forcefully. Name the outcome you are asking for, and ask for something proportionate.
Orders carry an automatic release so an abandoned one does not lock funds forever. If a package is late and the timer is approaching, open the dispute rather than waiting politely, because a dispute pauses the clock and an expiry does not. Late is never a reason to confirm receipt.
Decline as a standing policy rather than as a judgement about the person. Honest sellers do sometimes ask, usually for cash flow reasons, which is precisely why a policy beats a case by case decision. Telling an honest request from a fraudulent one is exactly what a buyer has no way to do.
Nexus Market