Compliance pipeline

Compliance in Tekmerion runs in a fixed order, and the transaction-level decision belongs to the merchant. Tekmerion screens; the merchant decides; Tekmerion has no authority to override that decision. There is no automatic refund.

Two layers

Compliance operates in two distinct layers.

Session screening runs before a deposit. Tekmerion screens the checkout session — an IP geoblock check and bot detection on the session context — and may block the session before any payment is possible. This is the only gate that acts ahead of a deposit.

The post-deposit pipeline runs per observed deposit, after the deposit is confirmed. It does not block the customer's transfer — the funds are already at the deposit address — and it determines what happens to them.

The fixed order

Once a deposit is confirmed, the post-deposit pipeline runs in this order:

1. Sanctions screening on the source address — the on-chain sender observed for the deposit.
2. The merchant's transaction-level decision, obtained through the merchant's KYT endpoint.

Each KYT invocation carries both the sanctions result and the session-level geoblock result as read-only context. Geoblock is evaluated at checkout session time, before deposit; the result is forwarded to the merchant for informational purposes but is not a separate post-deposit gate. The order is fixed; the merchant's decision is always last and always informed by the screening that preceded it.

The decision is the merchant's

The merchant returns one of three decisions: approve, reject, or hold. Approve sweeps the deposit to the merchant; reject refunds it; hold defers the decision. Tekmerion relays the merchant's signed authorization but has no authority to override the merchant's KYT decision. See the KYT webhook overview.

A hold defers resolution: Tekmerion re-invokes the endpoint after the requested delay. If the endpoint does not respond within its window, the merchant's configured timeout policy applies — by default, hold. See Hold and retries and SLA and timeouts.

No automatic refund

A refund exists only as the result of an explicit merchant reject decision that supplies a refund destination. Tekmerion never initiates a refund on its own authority, and no timeout policy resolves to a refund. There is no auto-refund path. How approve and reject move funds is described in Sweep and refund.

A sanctions hit overrides every decision

If the source address matches the sanctions list, the outcome is fixed regardless of the merchant's decision: no transfer is relayed, the funds are held at the deposit address, and no fee is taken. A merchant approve does not sweep, and a merchant reject is not auto-executed.

Tekmerion does not return funds to a sanctioned address automatically — doing so could itself constitute a violation. Resolution is manual and requires a merchant-supplied refund destination provided through the response channel under operational review. The held outcome and its fee-free resolution are detailed in Sweep and refund.