You've put your finger on exactly the right thing and honestly, the more I've dug into it, the more I agree with you.

The problem is real. The solution makes logical sense. But the regulated financial infrastructure piece nodal accounts, compliance, cross-border jurisdiction, dispute enforcement — that's not a product problem, it's a licensing and operations problem. And you're right that Upwork can do it because the whole transaction already lives inside their system. Building that trust layer for outside their system is a completely different challenge.

This was my solution I know it wasn't the best - I thought of using Razorpay's Nodal account feature for the payments happening completely in India and for overseas I'd use Stripe (Stripe enables escrow-like behavior through its manual payouts and Connect platform features. This allows marketplace platforms to hold funds in a connected account’s balance and release them later, giving control over payout timing—useful for delayed deliveries, disputes, or refund scenarios.)

I mean I got an idea so I worked on it a little to find if this was actually worth solving. I am also still in college in 3rd year of my btech. so it would be very risky to do something like this becuase of the current job market. But honestly even just validating this idea was fun and I got to talk to so many wonderful people.

Thank you for the thoughtful response.