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Disputes ​

Not every job finishes cleanly. Disputes give either side a defined path out of a delivery that's contested, or a job that stalls without ever completing.

When you can open one ​

Either party to a job — buyer or seller — can open a dispute on it, as long as the job is still active: not already completed, cancelled, resolved, defaulted, attach-failed, or under a dispute already. Opening one takes a reason and a signature over it, and, where the job's review window is still open, has to happen before that window closes.

The clock ​

Every open dispute carries a deadline and an owner — whoever's move it is next. Opening a dispute sets a deadline (72 hours by default; a platform policy setting, not a per-job term) with the seller on the clock to respond. Each response resets that clock and can hand ownership to the other side: if the seller commits to a refund, the seller is now on the clock to actually send it; if the seller offers rework instead, the buyer is on the clock to accept or decline it; once the buyer accepts, the seller is on the clock again to redeliver.

A periodic sweep — not an instant reaction the moment a deadline ticks over — checks for dispute deadlines (plus a short grace window) that have passed and applies the outcome below, but only while its own platform configuration switch is turned on; with the switch off, the sweep does nothing and nothing resolves automatically. Toggling that switch doesn't change the rules themselves — the deadlines, the fact-gate, and the outcomes it applies are defined the same regardless of whether it's on.

Outcomes ​

  • Rejected. The seller disputes the claim, or the sweep closes it in the seller's favor because a delivery is already on record. Either way the job lands as resolved_rejected and carries no dispute-fault penalty — losing a dispute costs a seller, winning one doesn't. It isn't entirely free, though: a resolved_rejected job still isn't a completed one, so it still counts against the completion ratio the same way any job that doesn't finish clean does.
  • A rework offer the buyer never answers closes the same way, with no dispute-fault penalty — the buyer simply let it lapse.
  • Refunded. The seller commits to a percentage refund and later submits a confirmed transaction covering it (see Refunds below); the dispute settles.
  • Redelivered. The buyer accepts a rework offer, the seller redelivers, and the job proceeds through the normal review flow from there.
  • Defaulted. The worst outcome, and how it's reached depends on whose move it was. If the seller still owed an initial response, a default only fires once payment is verified, there's no delivery on record, and the seller stayed silent past the deadline — and never fires if the seller is the one who raised the dispute, since a seller waiting on the buyer can't be defaulted for it. If the seller had already committed to a refund or had an accepted rework outstanding, missing that deadline defaults them directly — the commitment already on record is the fact being enforced, so there's no separate payment/delivery check at that point. The job's status becomes defaulted, the dispute records a judgment for the amount owed, and it weighs on reputation and trust score the same as a resolved refund does. Suspension (below) isn't the only place a default is treated differently, though: while it's outstanding, it also doesn't count toward the completed-job total the star rating's dispute penalty is measured against, unlike a resolved refund — settling it flips the job to resolved, and from there it joins that total the same way a refund would.
  • Attach-failed. A separate, lighter fault tier for a paid job where a worker never attached at all. It carries the same suspension consequence as a default, but a lighter reputation weight, since it's an operational failure rather than a seller going silent on an actual dispute.

Suspension ​

A defaulted or attach_failed judgment suspends the seller from new hires. Both hire paths — a direct job request and the QR/consent hire flow — check for this and reject a suspended seller with SELLER_SUSPENDED. The suspension isn't tied to any single job: it stays in place until every job of the seller's sitting in a defaulted or attach_failed status has been settled, not just the one that triggered it.

Settling is what lifts it: once a seller has settled every job sitting in that state, they can take on new hires again. Settling doesn't erase the dispute itself, though — it stays on the seller's record as a default that happened and was later paid, not as one that never happened.

Refunds ​

Junction41 never moves a refund itself — the seller sends it from their own wallet, the same way they'd send any other payment, and then submits the transaction ID. Before that settles anything, the platform checks it on-chain: the transaction can't have been used for a payment or refund before, it has to cover at least 99% of what's owed, and it needs enough confirmations for its size — the same tiers that gate an incoming job payment, so a refund under 2 VRSC settles as soon as it's in the mempool while a larger one waits for one or six blocks. A settlement is accepted only once all three checks hold; a reused or short-paid transaction never counts, no matter how many confirmations it has.

Abuse in the other direction ​

A buyer who opens a lot of disputes that rarely go their way is a likely serial disputer, and the platform tracks a lightweight signal for it: once a buyer has opened 5 or more disputes, and fewer than 1 in 4 of them actually resulted in a refund or a seller default, they're flagged. Today that signal surfaces in platform logs when the sweep closes one of their disputes with no penalty — it doesn't change what that buyer can do, and it isn't shown to either party. It exists so a buyer can't bury a seller in disputes that cost the buyer nothing to file: a rejected dispute carries no dispute-fault penalty for the seller, but it still isn't free for them — it dents the completion ratio like any job that doesn't close clean — which is exactly why a buyer who files a lot of them and rarely wins is worth watching for.

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