Cross-border B2B payments are one of the largest flows of money on earth and one of the slowest. Industry estimates put the annual volume of cross-border B2B transactions above 150 trillion dollars, yet the dominant rail underneath them, the correspondent-banking wire, still takes one to five business days to clear, charges 25 to 50 dollars per leg, and loses further value to FX spreads that routinely exceed one percent. For a global agency paying a contractor in another jurisdiction, the money is effectively frozen for most of a working week while both parties simply wait.
The freelance economy sits on top of the same problem and adds a second tax. Upwork moved to a flat 10 percent service fee for freelancers in 2023, Fiverr takes 20 percent of every order, and dedicated escrow providers such as Escrow.com charge a tiered fee of roughly 0.9 to 3.25 percent on top of the underlying bank transfer. On a 10,000 dollar engineering engagement, the person who did the work can lose anywhere from several hundred to two thousand dollars before the funds reach an account they control. The platform's value is trust, and trust has been priced like a monopoly.
Pyris Pact is a programmable B2B payments protocol that replaces the intermediary with a deterministic state machine. A client locks USDC into a milestone escrow before work begins, the contractor submits proof of delivery onchain, and the client releases the funds with a single transaction. The contract, PyrisPact.sol, is deployed on Arc Mainnet at address 0xb5f905f48321F44e379d8680e947dDd05830AF62 and exposes five state-changing functions, createPact, submitWork, releaseFunds, refund, and dispute, along with read functions such as getPact, getClientPacts, and getVendorPacts for indexing. The full function reference and escrow flow are documented at https://pyris.tech/docs.
The choice of Arc is not incidental. Arc is Circle's purpose-built Layer 1 for stablecoin finance, and its defining property is that USDC is the native gas token, exposed by the EVM with 18 decimals. Pyris Pact is deployed in native mode, meaning escrow amounts are passed as transaction value rather than through an ERC-20 approve-and-transfer sequence. The practical consequence is that a client locking 1,000 USDC pays a network fee on the order of a thousandth of a dollar, denominated in the same asset, and never has to acquire ETH or any other volatile token to interact with the protocol.
Each Pact moves through exactly five states, encoded onchain as FUNDED, SUBMITTED, RELEASED, REFUNDED, and DISPUTED. A Pact is born FUNDED the moment the client's USDC is locked, which is the moment the contractor can verify the deposit directly on the Arc block explorer. It transitions to SUBMITTED when the contractor attaches a submission note, typically a pull request URL, a repository link, or a design file reference. It terminates in RELEASED when the client approves, in REFUNDED when the deadline passes without delivery or the contractor voluntarily cancels, and it can be flagged DISPUTED by either party when the deliverable does not match the agreed scope.
Settlement speed is the second structural difference. Arc produces blocks with sub-second finality, so the interval between a client calling releaseFunds and the contractor holding spendable USDC is measured in seconds rather than days. Compared with a SWIFT wire, that is a reduction in settlement latency of roughly five orders of magnitude. Compared with a platform payout, which typically adds its own five-to-fourteen-day holding period before the bank transfer even starts, the difference is larger still.
Protection in the protocol runs in both directions, which is what distinguishes escrow from a simple prepayment. The contractor is protected because the funds are provably locked and cannot be withdrawn unilaterally by the client while the Pact is FUNDED or SUBMITTED. The client is protected because the deadline is enforced by the contract itself, and once it lapses without a submission the full amount can be reclaimed. Neither party depends on the goodwill of the other, and neither depends on the developers of Pyris Pact, who hold no custodial role and no ability to move deposited funds.
It is equally important to state what the protocol does not do. A smart contract can verify that a submission occurred and that a deadline was met, but no EVM opcode can judge whether a brand identity is visually strong or whether a Next.js frontend is sufficiently responsive. Qualitative review remains a human decision made offchain. Pyris Pact is therefore designed around explicit submissions, client-side approval, and a DISPUTED status that acts as a flag for offchain resolution rather than an onchain arbitrator. The protocol automates the payment rail, not the judgment. The whitepaper at https://pyris.tech/whitepaper sets out these boundaries in detail, together with the trust model and the four design pillars behind the contract.
For the operator, the frontend at https://pyris.tech surfaces this state machine as a working dashboard. The dashboard at https://pyris.tech/app aggregates total escrow volume, active and settled counts, and filters Pacts by outgoing (as client) and incoming (as contractor), while the public directory shows every registered Pact with its amount, status, deadline, and counterparties. The application is built on Next.js with wagmi and viem, connects through any injected wallet, and can be pointed at a local Anvil chain or Arc Mainnet, chain ID 5042, through environment variables alone.
The broader thesis is that stablecoins have reached the scale where B2B settlement no longer needs to route through banks at all. USDC circulation has grown into the tens of billions of dollars, and Arc exists specifically to give that liquidity a settlement layer with predictable fees and instant finality. Pyris Pact is a narrow, honest application of that infrastructure. It does not promise to replace contracts, courts, or client relationships. It promises that when a client says the work is done, the money moves in the same second, in full, and in the currency both parties already agreed on. Open the dashboard at https://pyris.tech/app, read the docs at https://pyris.tech/docs, or start with the whitepaper at https://pyris.tech/whitepaper.