Arbitration

Most trades settle without anyone needing to step in. When they don't — payment didn't arrive, the wrong amount was sent, the counterparty went silent — the order moves into arbitration. Someone neutral looks at what each side submitted and decides who gets the money. This page is about who that "someone" is and how the decision gets made.

Today — the Senior Arbitration Committee

Every dispute on InVeil routes to the Senior Arbitration Committee, a fixed panel of three vetted arbitrators. There are no levels, no random draws, no commit-reveal voting, and no on-chain appeal. Both parties pay a 150 USDT filing fee, submit their encrypted evidence, and the panel votes during a deliberation window. The ruling is binding on-chain, the funds release the moment the vote closes, and the outcome is recorded against both parties' reputation.

Two fixed windows govern the timeline. The contract enforces both; nobody — not the panel, not us — can extend them.

If fewer than three panel members vote and the tally is a tie (0-0 or 1-1), the contract defaults the outcome to the dispute responder on burden-of-proof grounds. The initiator opened the case; if they couldn't move a majority of the panel, the protocol falls back to the status quo. This rule only fires when the panel itself is split; a panel that voted decisively in either direction settles on its tally.

What does not change between any party and any case: funds stay in smart-contract custody throughout the dispute, the committee can only move them along the rule-allowed paths the contract defines, and there is no off-platform back channel. A committee member who tries to "settle this offline" has nothing to offer — the only way to release escrow is through the on-chain ruling.

Why a committee today, instead of decentralized arbitration

We'll be direct: a decentralized arbitration system needs a large, diverse pool of staked, anonymous jurors for random draws to actually be random. InVeil isn't there yet, and won't be until the platform has serious volume. Running random-draw arbitration against a small pool is worse than running a vetted committee — bad-faith collusion is cheap when the pool is too small to be representative, and a tiny pool also makes it possible for a single juror to learn who the parties to a dispute are just from the pattern of cases they're drawn into.

So the trade we made for the launch phase: we picked the most accountable centralized arrangement we could — a three-seat panel composed of the founding team, personally on the hook for every ruling — instead of pretending a small staked pool is meaningfully decentralized. We accept that today's panel is centralized. Pretending otherwise would be the worse failure.

What's ahead — Inveil v2

If the platform grows to the volume where a staking pool can support real random draws, we'll ship Inveil v2 — a rebuild of the protocol in Arbitrum Stylus (Rust-based execution on Arbitrum) that introduces partial decentralization. The shape we're aiming for:

• L1–L3 jurors drawn at random from a staked pool. New disputes enter at L1; the loser can appeal to a larger panel at L2, then L3. Stake-weighted random draws, anonymous in both directions, voting via commit-reveal so jurors can't see each other's votes before locking their own. The honest read of the evidence becomes the focal point — economists call that a Schelling point.
• L4 — the Senior Committee — remains as the final-appeal seat. Decentralization doesn't mean the committee disappears; it means the committee retreats from being the default entry point to being the floor of the system. If three independent panels of staked jurors can't reach a coherent verdict, the committee is the backstop.
• Stronger anonymity at the protocol layer. Stylus's lower execution costs let us afford cryptographic mechanisms (deeper zero-knowledge proofs in the evidence path, stronger commit-reveal hiding) that were too expensive under the Solidity-only stack.

Concrete dates and numbers live downstream of "do we have the user base to make this work" — see the Roadmap for the gating conditions.

Whether opening a dispute is even the right move — and the negotiation path you'd usually try first — lives on its own page: When things go wrong.