Venere: Blockchain-Based Escrow Protocol for Luxury Resale

Abstract

Venere was designed and implemented as a domain specific blockchain escrow protocol for luxury resale marketplaces. The system consists of three interconnected smart contracts—ProductNFT, Marketplace, and Escrow—deployed on a local Ethereum blockchain using Hardhat. A complete frontend was developed using Next.js, React, Chakra UI, and ethers.js, with MetaMask wallet integration for user interaction. IPFS metadata storage via Pinata enables persistent product information while maintaining on-chain references. Functional validation was performed through comprehensive automated testing, covering all escrow scenarios including successful completion, buyer disputes, and admin resolutions. Gas usage was measured for all core operations, with mintProduct requiring 304,693 gas units and escrow operations ranging from 47,066 to 141,427 gas units. Escrow fairness was demonstrated through testing of all dispute resolution mechanisms, confirming that funds remain locked until proper authorization is received.

Introduction

The paper addresses trust and transparency issues in luxury resale markets, where high-value transactions suffer from risks such as fraud, counterfeit goods, and disputes over payment and authenticity. Traditional centralized escrow systems partially solve these problems but introduce limitations like high costs, delays, lack of transparency, and single points of failure.

To overcome these issues, the paper proposes Venere, a blockchain-based escrow marketplace that integrates NFTs (ERC-721 tokens) with smart contract–driven escrow mechanisms. Luxury products are represented as NFTs containing structured metadata (brand, serial number, condition, etc.), while ownership and transaction history are recorded immutably on the Ethereum blockchain. Product metadata is stored off-chain using IPFS, reducing gas costs while maintaining verifiable references.

Venere’s architecture consists of three main smart contract components:

• ProductNFT contract for minting and managing luxury item tokens,
• Marketplace contract for fixed-price sales and auctions,
• Escrow contract for locking funds until delivery confirmation or dispute resolution.

The system ensures secure transactions through automated escrow logic, where funds are released only after buyer confirmation or admin arbitration. A web-based frontend (Next.js/React) with MetaMask integration allows users to interact with the platform, while events emitted by smart contracts ensure real-time synchronization.

Conclusion

Venere was implemented as a complete blockchain-based escrow protocol specifically designed for luxury resale marketplaces. The system architecture consists of three interconnected smart contracts: ProductNFT for representing luxury goods as ERC-721 tokens with comprehensive metadata, Marketplace for facilitating both fixed-price and auction-based sales mechanisms, and Escrow for implementing conditional payments and dispute resolution. This modular design enables specialized functionality while maintaining clear separation of concerns between ownership representation, trading logic, and payment security. The system was fully implemented and validated using the Hardhat development environment on a local Ethereum blockchain. Comprehensive automated testing validated all escrow flows, including successful completion, buyer disputes with refunds, and administrative resolutions favoring both buyers and sellers. Marketplace operations were successfully executed across all major functions including direct purchases, auction bidding, and seller earnings withdrawal. Invalid transaction states correctly reverted with appropriate error messages, confirming proper access control and state validation. Gas usage was measured for all core opera-tions, providing empirical data for cost analysis and optimization assessment. Experimental validation confirmed that the escrow protocol behaves correctly under all tested scenarios, demonstrating secure fund locking mechanisms, reliable buyer confirmation processes, and effective dispute handling. The administratorbased resolution system operated as designed, providing fair outcomes for disputed transactions while maintaining proper access controls. All validation scenarios executed successfully, establishing that the smart contract logic operates deterministically and securely across various transaction conditions. The results demonstrate the practical feasibility of implementing domain-specific escrow protocols using smart contracts for luxury resale applications. The combination of NFTbased ownership records, comprehensive metadata storage, and automated dispute resolution provides a foun-dation for secure high-value transactions. The architecture successfully balances transparency, security, and efficiency while main-taining predictable transaction costs through measured gas consumption patterns. Future work may include deployment to public Ethereum test networks to validate performance under real network conditions, Layer-2 integration for reduced transaction costs, decentralized arbitration models for dispute resolution, and further optimization of smart contract gas usage. These enhancements would build upon the solid foundation established through the current implementation and validation, extending the system’s capa-bilities while maintaining the core escrow protocol principles demonstrated in this research.

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Copyright

Copyright © 2026 Anjali Dubey, Heer Mehta, Aryaman Deolia, Dr. Ragupathi T. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.