Non-custodial P2P trading

On most peer-to-peer exchanges, selling crypto means first depositing it with the platform. The platform holds it, shows you a balance, and releases it when the trade completes. That balance is a promise — if the platform is hacked, frozen, or simply decides otherwise, the coins are not yours to move.

A non-custodial trade removes that step. Your crypto goes directly from your own wallet into an escrow smart contract on the blockchain, and Elexa never has the ability to take it out. There is no deposit, no withdrawal, and no Elexa-held balance involved.

This is the only way to trade on Elexa. There is no Elexa-held balance to deposit into and no option to have us hold your coins — every offer on the platform settles from a wallet you control, into a contract neither side can override.

The escrow contract is the only thing that ever holds the crypto, and each step is a transaction you can see on the block explorer:

• The seller connects their own wallet and signs a free message proving the address belongs to their Elexa account. No transaction, no gas.
• When a trade starts, the seller locks the exact trade amount in the escrow contract. The coins leave their wallet only at this point.
• The buyer sends the agreed payment by their chosen method and marks the trade as paid, which freezes the seller's refund timer.
• The seller confirms the payment arrived and releases the crypto. The contract sends it to the buyer directly.

At no point does Elexa hold the funds, and at no point can Elexa send them anywhere the contract does not allow.

The limits are written into the contract itself, not into a policy document, which means they hold even if Elexa wanted otherwise:

• Elexa can never pay itself. The contract only ever pays the buyer, the seller, or the fee collector, and the fee is fixed when the escrow is funded so no later call can raise it.
• Elexa can only act on a trade that one of the two parties has explicitly disputed. On an undisputed trade it has no power over the funds at all.
• An escrow nobody releases returns to the seller automatically once its payment window passes — and anyone can push that refund through, so it does not depend on Elexa being online.
• Elexa cannot pause a trade out of existence. Even when new trades are halted, releasing, disputing and refunding an existing escrow keep working.

In practice this means a compromised Elexa cannot touch the overwhelming majority of escrows: the normal path and the abandoned path both settle without us.

A self-custody wallet and a small amount of the network's own coin for transaction fees.

• On BNB Smart Chain: MetaMask, Trust Wallet, or any WalletConnect wallet, plus a little BNB for gas.
• On TRON: TronLink, Trust Wallet, OKX, or any wallet with a TRON browser, plus a little TRX for energy.
• Nothing else. There is no Elexa deposit address to send to, and no minimum balance to keep with us.

Buyers generally need no gas at all. Marking a payment as sent is relayed for you, so a buyer who holds none of the network's coin is never locked out of protecting their own trade.

It is not free of trade-offs, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

Self-custody means you are responsible for your own wallet. If you lose your seed phrase, nobody — including Elexa — can restore access, because there is nothing on our side to restore. You also pay network fees yourself, and you need to keep a small amount of the network's coin available to do it.

We think that is the right trade. The alternative is a balance that exists because we say it does, and the industry has spent a decade demonstrating what happens when that promise is tested.

Non-custodial escrow is live on every network Elexa trades, and the wallet page shows exactly which networks your connected wallets cover. Networks are added as escrow is deployed on them, so the tradable list is simply the list of chains with a live contract.

If you deposited coins with Elexa before this change, they are still there and still yours: the wallet page shows the remaining balance and lets you withdraw it to any address. Deposits are closed.