Finite State Machines for Trustless Escrow: How We Built a Decentralized Marketplace on TON

The Trust Problem in Digital Asset Marketplaces Buying a Telegram channel is sketchy. Buying any social media asset is sketchy. The seller could take your money and vanish. The buyer could receive the asset and dispute the payment. Every centralized escrow service is a single point of failure — and a single point of trust. We built ITOhub to solve this with on-chain escrow, oracle-confirmed transfers, and a deal lifecycle managed entirely by a Finite State Machine in a FunC smart contract. Here's how — and why FSMs are the perfect pattern for on-chain business logic. Why Finite State Machines? Every marketplace deal follows a predictable flow: created → funded → asset transferred → confirmed → completed (or disputed). This is textbook FSM territory. The beauty of encoding this in a smart contract: Every state transition is on-chain — fully auditable Invalid transitions are impossible — the contract rejects them No human arbitrator needed for the happy path Dispute resolution has clear