GPO and smart-contract escrow — where your money sits and how it moves

When you fund a Group Purchasing Order, your goods money doesn’t sit in Techs.Solar’s bank account. It sits in a single-purpose escrow program (a “smart contract”) on a public, EU-friendly ledger. Nobody — not us, not the coordinator, not the vendor — can redirect it. It can only ever go two places: to the vendor in stages as the goods provably progress, or back to you. This page explains that in plain terms. The binding version is your signed gpo-member-agreement-overview (clause 7 and Schedule F).

Is this crypto? Am I taking cryptocurrency risk?

No. Your euros become EURe — regulated electronic money, issued 1:1 for euros by an EU-licensed e-money institution (Monerium, EU-supervised) and redeemable 1:1 at any time. It’s the same idea as a balance on a payment app, not an investment token. Its price can’t “go down”. You never own or touch cryptocurrency: you pay in by normal SEPA bank transfer, and any refund comes back by normal SEPA transfer. The platform pays the ledger “gas” fees — never you.

The four payments, matched to progress

You fund 100% of the goods value upfront into escrow — that’s what unlocks wholesale pricing, because the vendor sees funded, guaranteed demand. Everything else arrives in installments tied to real progress:

1. P1 — Goods into escrow. Your goods amount, exact to the cent, paid into the escrow contract.
2. P2 — Platform fees. Fixed, known before you sign, invoiced once the whole group is fully funded.
3. P3 — Landed-cost advance. An estimated freight / customs / import-VAT advance, invoiced when your goods have actually shipped.
4. P4 — Reconciliation. A final true-up after delivery — refund if the estimate was high, a small top-up (capped at 5%) if it was low.

Only Payment 1 — your goods money — sits inside the escrow contract. The other two payments sit outside it, and we disclose that plainly: the platform fees (Payment 2) are ordinary invoices, and the landed-cost advance (Payment 3) sits in the importer’s segregated operating account during customs clearance (a normal commercial arrangement, not escrow).

Who decides when money is released

Never one party alone. Each milestone releases a fixed share of the pool and needs independent cryptographic signatures:

• Production (30%) — the manufacturer and the platform must both sign.
• Shipping (40%) — the manufacturer and the shipping line must both sign, and the evidence they sign includes an Inspection Certificate confirming the loaded goods match the order.
• Arrival / customs (remainder) — the signers configured for your GPO (up to three, all must sign), disclosed in Schedule F before you fund.

Every release is signed against hashed evidence, so a release can’t fire on the vendor’s word alone.

Your refund rights are automatic

You don’t sue and you don’t wait on anyone’s goodwill:

• If the group never fully funds by the funding deadline, the escrow auto-aborts and everyone who paid gets 100% back.
• If a milestone deadline lapses, your refund window opens by itself — you get your unreleased share (100% before production, 70% after production, 30% after shipping).
• If more than 51% of the group by committed weight votes to abort, anyone can execute it and remaining funds become refundable.
• Refunds keep working even during an emergency pause — that’s written into the program itself, and the pause committee has zero power to move funds.

What is NOT protected

Money already released to the vendor for a completed milestone is a real payment. If the vendor then fails, recovering it is a legal claim against the vendor, not an automatic escrow refund. What the escrow does is cap that exposure at the released stage (e.g. 30% after production) instead of the 100% a traditional full deposit would risk. Your Member Agreement states this in its own words — read it.

If Techs.Solar disappears tomorrow

Your escrowed money doesn’t care. The escrow runs by itself on a public ledger, your refund rights are enforced by code, and the euros behind your EURe are redeemable at par directly from the regulated issuer under EU law (MiCA Art. 49) — independently of our company.

You can verify all of it yourself

Your agreement’s Schedule F names the escrow’s public address. Every funding, release, and refund is a public transaction anyone can read, and the contract source code is published with its full test evidence (independently verified; an external professional audit is a hard condition before real money goes live). Any developer you trust can check the whole thing without trusting us.

Why a smart contract instead of a lawyer’s escrow account

Three things a traditional escrow can’t do at this cost: refunds that execute themselves on a deadline, a balance anyone can verify at any time, and one uniform mechanism across every EU country instead of a separate escrow agent per market. It’s deliberately invisible — you experience it as SEPA in, SEPA out.

Where to go from here

• What GPO is overall: what-is-gpo
• The binding contract behind all of this: gpo-member-agreement-overview
• What happens if a member can’t pay: what-happens-if-a-gpo-defaults

The full installer-facing FAQ (money safety, payments, roles, privacy) is at the /gpo/faq page. For jurisdiction-specific questions, consult a lawyer — this page describes how the program works, not what a court will decide.