Refunds require chain evidence.

An unpaid invoice can be cancelled or allowed to expire. No rank or Top Shield is granted until CipherPay reports the canonical invoice confirmed and shielded.bid applies that result exactly once.

If CipherPay already issued the invoice, abandoning or forgetting the recovery reference only clears local browser recovery. It does not cancel or mutate the provider invoice, which remains payable until expiry.

Board positions may change while an invoice is open. A Top Shield invoice does not hold the featured slot, and once another Top Shield payment is already detected, a later conflicting shield quote can be paused for manual review before final confirmation.

Every quote that creates or recovers a CipherPay invoice requires a network-correct Zcash Unified Address controlled by the payer. shielded.bid first stores it in private SpaceTimeDB payment state, then sends it to CipherPay when creating or recovering the invoice. It is never shown on the public board.

Check the address carefully. A completed refund is a new on-chain transfer and cannot be retrieved if the supplied address is wrong or no longer controlled by the payer.

Conflicting Top Shield settlement, mismatched provider data, ambiguous invoice creation, duplicate evidence, amount review, or another unsafe state pauses settlement. The placement is not silently credited.

Review has two recorded outcomes: apply the quoted placement credit when the authoritative ledger supports it, or confirm a real refund transaction. CipherPay does not send that refund for shielded.bid; an authorized operator must send and verify it on-chain before the record is closed.

A correctly confirmed placement is not refundable merely because another project later pays for a higher score or the season standings change. Rank is the result of the public paid ledger, not a guaranteed duration at a particular position.

Paying more ZEC than the current CipherPay invoice requests never grants extra rank. Amount discrepancies may require review and should not be used as a way to alter the quoted placement.

Keep the recovery reference shown by shielded.bid and contact payment support. Include the project URL and approximate payment time. Do not email a seed phrase, spending key, API key, dashboard token, or private wallet backup.