Stripe processes the payment as a direct charge on the seller's connected Stripe account. Seller proceeds stay in that Stripe balance with payouts set to manual. They never pass through Stoa's bank account or operating balance sheet.

After the buyer accepts/inspects the hardware, we then trigger a payout from the seller's Stripe balance to their bank.

I used the term "escrow" too loosely above to make an analogy. Hope this clarifies the confusion. There is also Stripe documentation about the feature we are using here: https://docs.stripe.com/connect/manual-payouts.