Leases & Escrow Payments

Paying on VirtEngine means funding an escrow account and letting verified usage draw it down. You never hand a provider payment credentials, and no payment finalizes while you have an open dispute against it.

The escrow model, tenant-side

• Deposit — you fund the escrow account (x/escrow) attached to your deployment. This backs every lease under it.
• Draw-down — settled usage transfers the agreed funds to the provider with 0% marketplace commission inside settlement. Validator transaction fees apply only to the relevant chain actions.
• Top-up — deposit more at any time to keep long-running leases alive.
• Exhaustion — an empty escrow account closes the lease. There is no negative balance and no debt.
• Refund — closing your deployment returns the unspent escrow balance to you after final settlement.

When money actually moves

Event	Timing
Usage record submitted	Hourly batches, on the reporting schedule
Dispute window	24 hours from submission — your challenge period
Settlement	Next settlement cycle after the window closes (hourly cycles; daily cycle at 00:00 UTC)
Provider payout	At settlement, the agreed amount with 0% marketplace commission

Practical implication: charges hit escrow roughly a day behind consumption. Reconcile against that lag, not against wall-clock usage.

Your dispute rights

Every usage record is disputable within the window:

virtengine tx settlement dispute-usage \
  --usage-id usage-1234567890 \
  --reason "CPU usage appears inflated" \
  --expected-cpu-hours 10 \
  --from customer

Guarantees the protocol gives you:

• Disputed usage cannot settle while the dispute is open.
• Corrections are transparent — an accepted dispute produces a new correction record referencing the original; history is never silently rewritten.
• Evidence is immutable once recorded.

Dispute states: Created → Pending → Reviewing → Resolved / Rejected / Expired.

Beyond the automated path, unresolved disputes can escalate through the on-chain support workflows in x/support.

Independent cross-checks

You are not the only line of defense. Before settlement, provider metrics are reconciled against independent platform metrics, and discrepancies above 25% block settlement automatically — large over-billing is caught even if you never look at a record. Anomaly and fraud checks (future timestamps, impossible durations, negative values) run on every record (see Usage Reporting).

Cost-control checklist

1. Fund escrow for your planned horizon; alert on the balance.
2. Spot-check usage records against your own workload telemetry.
3. Dispute inside 24 hours — the window does not extend.
4. Close deployments you’re done with; idle leases keep settling whatever the workload consumes.