Benchmark
Trust and escrow for online commerce in Nigeria.
- Role
- Builder, with my team
- Type
- Team
- Year
- May 2026
- Status
- Shipped
- Category
- Hackathons
- Main stack
- Squad APIs, JavaScript +4
Overview
Benchmark is a trust and escrow layer for online commerce in Nigeria, built on Squad's payment APIs for the Squad Hackathon, where we placed fourth out of about 1,600 entrants. It verifies vendors before they receive payment, so buyers stop sending money to people they cannot trust.
A vendor is checked with a liveness test and a face match against a government ID. Buyer payments then sit in a dedicated Squad virtual account and are released to the vendor only after delivery is confirmed, or after 72 hours pass. A portable Trust Score updates with every transaction, dispute and on time delivery.
Under the hood, an Isolation Forest model flags unusual payment velocity, amounts and hours, and an NLP model sorts buyer disputes and resolves the confident ones automatically. A JavaScript SDK, squadbenchjs, lets marketplaces and logistics platforms plug escrow and trust into their own products.
Highlights
- •Vendor identity checks with liveness and ID face matching.
- •Escrow on Squad virtual accounts with release on delivery.
- •Portable Trust Score that buyers, platforms and vendors can see.
- •Fraud detection and automatic dispute classification.
- •A JavaScript SDK for marketplaces to integrate.
A hard part
The problem
Social commerce vendors are mostly unverified, and payment providers move money well but say nothing about who is on the other end.
How it was solved
Benchmark adds the missing layer. Squad handles the money, while Benchmark verifies the vendor, holds funds in escrow and scores trust over time.
Built with
- Squad APIs
- JavaScript
- Vercel
- Isolation Forest
- NLP
- squadbenchjs
