How Vampchain works

Pick any existing ERC20 on Base, Ethereum, or Robinhood Chain. Pay the annual fee — currently $1,000.00 in USDC — and we spin up a single-node EVM chain that runs on your token as gas. It's real: real RPC, real blocks, real transactions, usually live well under a minute after payment.

The fee drains linearly over the year, and it's fully public — anyone can top up a chain's runway, not just its creator. Nobody, including us, can charge for time not yet served.

Exact fee mechanics — including the rare cases where we'd adjust an existing chain's rate — are in the terms.

Every transaction spends gas in the chain's own token — split into a priority fee (a tip to the block producer) and a base fee (burned outright, standard Ethereum rules). We recapture both and split the total three ways, automatically, for as long as the chain runs: a third to the creator, a third to the protocol, a third back into the chain's own funding.

This is on top of the annual fee, not instead of it — the fee covers our infrastructure; the split is the ongoing reward for growing a chain.

Want the full mechanics — how the tip and the burn actually get claimed, and when? See how fees work.

Bridging into an obscure chain is a real risk — not losing a trade, but the chain flatlining. That's what the runway third above is for: it goes to a wallet kept separate from the protocol's own share, earmarked for conversion back into that chain's funding on a best-effort basis. The more a chain gets used, the more its own users extend its life. Every chain page shows exactly how much that wallet is holding and how much it's actually delivered — live and checkable, not just promised.

We also track, and publicly show, how much real gas every wallet has spent per chain — we call it blood given. No payout, just a leaderboard: credit for whoever's actually keeping a chain's lights on. Check any chain's page for its top donors.

A vampchain doesn't vanish the moment its paid runway hits zero. Here's the sequence:

1. 01

   Active

   Fully funded and running — deposits, minting, top-ups, everything works. Anyone can extend the runway; that's the public anti-rug mechanism.

2. 02

   Runway runs out

   Paid runway hits zero. The chain doesn't shut off — it moves into a one-week grace period.

3. 03

   Grace period (7 days)

   Stays fully open for a week — same as step 01. A real rescue window: top it up and it's back to normal, nothing lost.

4. 04

   Snapshot

   If grace expires unfunded, we take one last read of every real balance — every wallet, every token — and publish it on the home chain as a Merkle root. Infrastructure is torn down right after.

5. 05

   Claim window (30 days)

   Anyone with funds on the chain can look up their wallet and withdraw exactly what the snapshot shows, proven against that root.

6. 06

   Swept

   Whatever's still unclaimed after 30 days goes to the protocol. The chain is gone for good — a new one for the same token can always be created from scratch.

Chain torn down? Look up your wallet to see if you have anything to claim.

• Unaudited, experimental software run by a small team — not a foundation, not a DAO.
• The bridge is secured by a single relayer key we control, not a light client or multisig. If that key is compromised, bridged funds are at risk.
• The business could shut down, and any chain can be frozen or torn down — the grace period and snapshot process are best-effort, not a guarantee.
• Funds in other protocols on top of a vampchain (DEXs, lending, anything you build there) carry extra risk if that chain is frozen or torn down.
• Bugs are a real possibility in software this new. Treat everything you bridge in as money you could lose entirely.

This page is the plain-language version. Read the full terms before you bridge anything you can't afford to lose forever.