USDC is a regulated, dollar-pegged stablecoin — a digital token intended to hold a value of one U.S. dollar, issued by Circle. Solis uses USDC on the Ethereum network. Important: USDC exists on several blockchains, and they are not interchangeable. Solis uses Ethereum (ERC-20) USDC; sending the wrong-network version can result in loss of funds.

A wallet is the software that holds your digital assets and signs transactions on your behalf — it is how you prove, cryptographically, that an instruction came from you. Solis connects to your wallet through WalletConnect and supports a range of self-custody wallets (for example, MetaMask, Rainbow, Coinbase Wallet, Rabby, OKX Wallet, and Trust Wallet, among others). You must use a self-custody wallet; a custodial exchange account (such as an exchange app login) cannot connect and sign. Your wallet — not Solis — controls your funds and your signatures.

An escrow holds funds until agreed conditions are met. A smart contract is a program that runs on a blockchain and executes automatically according to its code. Solis’s escrow contract holds the settlement funds and releases them only when the conditions in the code are satisfied — here, the recipient’s acceptance — without a human deciding when to release.

Atomic means all-or-nothing. When the settlement executes, the payment to the recipient, the payment to the neutral, and the protocol fee all happen in a single transaction. Either every transfer succeeds together, or none happens and the funds stay in escrow. There is no state in which one party is paid but another is not.

The Universal Settlement Agreement (USA) is the legal document Solis produces for every matter, binding the parties to a legally enforceable release of claims and settlement. It has two parts: a Cover Page, filled in automatically with the matter-specific details (parties, amount, dispute description, timestamps), and the Standard Terms, which are identical — word for word — across every Solis settlement. The USA is drafted to fully release each side under broad terms and is governed by New York law. The Standard Terms are published under an open license (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0).

When a matter is funded and settled, the public blockchain records: a cryptographic hash of the signed settlement agreement, which may include multiple versions depending on the specific stage of the signature process; the matter identifier; the parties' wallet addresses (Payor, Recipient, Neutral) and the Solis fee address; the settlement amount and how it is split between the payment to the Recipient, any neutral fee, and the protocol fee; the deadlines; and the funding, fee-distribution, and completion events.

The parties' names are not recorded on-chain, and neither is the text of the agreement or the details of the dispute. Each party signs the agreement with its wallet, so each is bound to the document it saw, and the Payor, the Recipient, and the Neutral each keep a copy.

Be aware that the wallet addresses, the settlement amount, and the fee split are public and permanent. Wallet addresses are pseudonymous rather than anonymous — they can sometimes be correlated with identity through outside information. Do not put anything on-chain you are unwilling to have public.