Concepts

Overview & Mental Model

ChainRender has five moving parts. Once you can name them, the whole system fits in your head.

The Vocabulary — a closed set of UI primitives (box, text, button, image, chart, table, controls, …) you compose an app from. You cannot express anything outside it, which is what makes apps analyzable and safe.
The Compiler — turns your composition into content-addressed bytes. The hash of those bytes is the app.
Resolvers — on-chain contracts that supply live data (a price, a balance, an ENS name, a chart series). Your UI binds to them; they're read at render time.
The Enforcer & Grade — proves what an app can do, refuses unsafe ones, and assigns an honest trust grade.
The Renderer — a view function that turns a hash into HTML/SVG, deterministically, for free.

The flow: compose → compile (get a hash) → register bytes once → render for free forever, with resolvers supplying live data and the grade disclosing trust. Presentation (theme) is a render-time parameter layered on top; versioning is an explicit registry layered on top. Everything else is immutable.

Start here — build it correctly

Before the feature list: a ChainRender app is a compiled component, registered on-chain, rendered by an eth_call — the component is the app. The most common mistake is building a normal React app that fetches data with viem and only uses ChainRender to display a hash. That is not a ChainRender app. See Building Correctly for the sharp line + the compile→register→render flow. Building with an AI? Give it the MCP server & app-builder skill so it builds correctly by default.

Capability map — what you can build

ChainRender is one primitive (compose → compile → register → render) applied across many capability areas. Each links to its guide:

UI & components — the render pipeline, the closed vocabulary, and theming applied at render time.
Live on-chain data — resolvers read prices, balances, ENS, attestations, and any contract's view state, rendered honestly.
DeFi — a complete DeFi capability suite: market prices, a user's LP + lending positions (with health factor), pre-trade quotes, approval-state gating, Curve, portfolio totals, and Uniswap hook rendering.
RWA (real-world assets) — a RWA capability suite: Proof-of-Reserve coverage, ERC-3643 (T-REX) compliance display, and issuer-bound credential lifecycle — display compliance, never become the compliance authority.
Reputation & social — a reputation capability suite: the EFP social graph (forward follow/tag/block/mute, Grade A), delegated address vouching (rep-vouch/rep-tally), a cross-source aggregate (rep-aggregate, grade capped at the weakest source), and ERC-725Y / ERC-735 account claim reads (the standard behind LUKSO Universal Profiles — read on the chain the resolver is deployed on, ≤ C; LUKSO's own chain is not integrated) — read + render reputation, never mint a score.
Actions & payments — declared actions decoded before signing, and payments (crypto floor + optional off-chain card on-ramp, honestly graded).
Rich media — p5.js & three.js running over an on-chain floor, plus on-chain icons and advanced scenes.
Composition & multi-view — composing apps from registered components.
Discovery & sharing — the Apps directory (deployed apps read on-chain, self-updating).
Trust & privacy — the trust grade, the enforcer, trust signals, and privacy.
Deploying & scaling — L2 deployment strategy, size limits & Glamsterdam, and testing.
Future-Ethereum alignment — why the render-and-declare, read-first, ownerless model is in-line with where Ethereum is heading (the cryptographic world computer).

See The Render Pipeline for the step-by-step, and Content Addressing for the foundation.