Escrow, Subscriptions and Logistics: The Payment Pallets

Commerce needs more than transfers. It needs money held until goods arrive, payments that recur, a record of who handed what to whom, and a way for a business to pay its customers' fees. EmpoorioChain has each of these as a native pallet. This post is the map, and the flow they compose.

The pallets

Pallet	Index	Role in a sale
`pallet-marketplace`	43	Listings, offers, acceptance
`pallet-escrow`	72	Holds the buyer's funds; releases on a condition; refunds on timeout
`pallet-logistics`	79	Records custody handoffs — merchant → courier → customer
`pallet-subscription`	73	Recurring payments with cancel and renewal rules
`pallet-paymaster`	70	A sponsor pays the transaction fees for a set of users under a policy
`pallet-stablecoins`	46	DUSD, the pricing unit
`pallet-nft-royalties`	83	Creator share applied on every resale

All are wired into the live runtime (spec 220). None has yet carried a real merchant transaction, and the distinction between wired and exercised is one this ecosystem now keeps explicitly.

The designed flow

Customer (Eoonia)         Merchant (Manager)         Courier (Riders)
      │ pay in DUSD ──▶ escrow.lock ─────────────────────────────┐
      │                      │ confirm order                     │
      │                      │ logistics.handoff(merchant→courier)│
      │                                                          │ deliver
      │ confirm receipt ◀────────────────── logistics.handoff(courier→customer)
      │                      escrow.release ──▶ merchant (minus fee 80/20 burn/treasury)

If the customer never confirms and the timeout passes, escrow releases automatically against the delivery record.
If the merchant cancels before handoff, escrow refunds.
The merchant's fees can be sponsored by pallet-paymaster under a policy (whitelisted merchants, per-transaction cap, allowed pallets) validated at the entry point, so a new restaurant never has to acquire DMS to receive its first payment.

Subscriptions

pallet-subscription covers the recurring cases — a meal plan, a warehouse storage fee, a software seat — with on-chain renewal and cancellation. It is also the native equivalent of ERC-4907's rental role for NFTs, which is how a time-limited licence on a media asset would be expressed.

Why pallets and not contracts

Because an escrow that every app must integrate separately is an escrow that one app will get wrong. A runtime escrow has one implementation, one set of events indexers read, one fee rule, and it cannot be bypassed by a marketplace that forgot to call it. The same argument applies to royalties and to compliance, and it is the rule the architecture documentation states for when a pallet beats a contract.

Status

The apps that would drive this flow — Eats, Manager, Riders, Warehouse, Square Sellers — are in production and settle in fiat. The wallet link between an app and Eoonia is live in Warehouse. The first on-chain order is the next milestone, and it will be reported here with its block number.

Based on PALLET_REFERENCE.md, EIP_COVERAGE.md, FEE_MODEL_AND_LOW_COST_STRATEGY.md and the four-app feature inventory.