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Security

Security & custody

Where your pledge is held while you are doing the work, who is able to move it, and how to check any of this for yourself.

Last updated: August 2026

1. Where Your Pledge Sits

A dedicated escrow vault, not a company account

Your pledge is held in USDC — a dollar-backed digital currency — inside a dedicated escrow vault on Base, a public payments network. It does not sit in Accustom's bank account and is never mixed with the money we use to run the company.

Your wallet belongs to you

You can sign in with a wallet you already control, or sign in with email or a social account and have one created for you by Privy — nothing to install, no seed phrase to write down. Either way it is yours: your pledge moves from that wallet into the vault only when you approve the transaction on your own device, and we never hold your keys or sign for you. The other side of that is real — if you lose access to your wallet we cannot restore it for you, and funds in it may be permanently lost.

Held per person, per Challenge

The vault records your deposit against you and the specific Challenge you joined. Your balance is tracked individually — it is not pooled into one anonymous bucket, and a payout for one Challenge cannot draw on another.

2. How Money Moves

A Challenge is settled according to the rules you agreed to when you joined. Those rules are set out in full on the Official Rules page. In short:

You complete it

Your full pledge is released from the vault back to your wallet, plus your share of the bonus reward pool.

You miss a day

A grace day covers it and your pledge stays intact — though each one you spend reduces your share of the bonus. Miss a day with no grace days left and you are disqualified: the whole pledge is forfeited, not just that day.

A Challenge settles

Forfeited pledges form the bonus reward pool, distributed to Achievers less the platform fee shown on that Challenge — 12% unless it states otherwise.

A Commit works differently: there is no disqualification and no grace days. Your pledge is split across your check-ins and each one settles on its own, so a missed day costs that day and nothing more.

Why Accustom authorises the release

A payments network cannot know whether you actually went for your run. Someone has to check the evidence and confirm the outcome, and that is us — using the verification rules published in advance. So while the vault holds the money, Accustom is what instructs it to pay out. This is the same arrangement you have with any escrow agent.

3. What Accustom Can and Cannot Do

Said plainly

Some services in this space claim that nobody, including them, can ever touch customer funds. We are not going to tell you that, because for Accustom it would not be true. Accustom holds the authorisation to move funds out of the vault, including an emergency control that can move the entire balance to a secure address if the vault is ever compromised. That control exists to protect your money, but it is real, and you should know it is there before you pledge.

Accustom can

  • Release your pledge back to you when your check-ins are verified
  • Deduct the agreed amount for a missed or failed check-in, and send it to the recipient you chose
  • Distribute the bonus reward pool to Achievers when a Challenge settles
  • Withdraw the platform fee disclosed on the Challenge you joined
  • Pause the vault and move funds to a secure address if a critical bug or compromise is found

Accustom cannot

  • Take money from your wallet — every deposit is signed by you, from your device
  • Change the terms of a Challenge after you have joined it
  • Change the platform fee after you have joined
  • Spend or lend your pledge while your Challenge is running

4. Verify It Yourself

Every movement is public

Because the vault lives on a public network, every deposit and every payout is recorded permanently and openly. You do not have to take our word for the balance, and you do not need our permission to check it. Anyone can look, at any time, including you.

The escrow vault

The vault address will be published here as soon as Accustom opens for live pledges, so you can inspect the balance and its full history before you deposit anything.

5. What This Is Not

Accustom is not a bank, and a pledge is not a deposit, a savings product, or an investment. It is money set aside to back a commitment you have made, returned to you when you keep it. It earns no interest, it is not insured by any government deposit scheme, and it is not protected against every possible failure.

Full legal terms are in the Terms of Service, and what we record about your wallet is set out in the Privacy Policy. Where this page and those documents differ, those documents govern.

Still have questions?

If anything here is unclear, or you want to know something about how your money is handled that this page does not answer, ask us. We would rather explain it than have you guess.

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