What is the Hand-off Ceremony, and why does it exist?
A plain-language walkthrough of the mechanism behind Sigmamarkt's 'seller cannot pull the account back' guarantee.
Gaming account sales have run on the same broken model for years: the seller hands email + password to the buyer; the buyer pays; everyone hopes the seller doesn't file a recovery form six months later. That hope amounts to millions of dollars in losses every year. Sigmamarkt answers with a structural fix we call the Hand-off Ceremony.
What happens the moment a listing opens?
When a seller wants to list an account, the last step of the listing-creation flow is a ceremony: the account's email recovery is bound to Sigmamarkt, 2FA is under our control, the phone number is held in the system. This is a temporary, auditable access — every row written to an audit log.
From this point on, the seller no longer 'controls' the account. Even if they try to list the same account on G2G, it doesn't help: when a buyer logs in, 2FA goes to Sigmamarkt, recovery email arrives at Sigmamarkt. Double-listing becomes impossible.
What happens when the sale closes?
When the listing matches a buyer and the payment lands in escrow, a second ceremony runs: Sigmamarkt transfers the access it holds to the buyer. Recovery email re-binds to the buyer, 2FA seed is given to the buyer, phone is updated. This transaction is also signed into the audit log. During the 7-day inspection window the buyer reviews the account; if no dispute, the window closes and payout opens for the seller.
What if the seller files a recovery form later?
It won't work. The recovery email is now the buyer's. The 2FA seed is with the buyer. The seller can say 'I know this account' all they want, but when the game publisher looks for 'who actually has proof', the seller is empty-handed. On top of that, we have an HMAC-chained proof of transfer: the Provenance Chain signs that handoff. In a legal process, this concretely shows who owned what, when.
Isn't this bad for sellers?
Quite the opposite. The Hand-off Ceremony is also seller insurance: the seller can never be accused of 'I sold it, someone stole my account, I want it back' — because the chain proves the transfer. A single-direction mechanism, forever, for every sale. Once a seller hands off, both the buyer wins and the seller is freed from the call-back burden.